Value RAM Roundup: Computing On a Budget
by Wesley Fink on April 11, 2005 4:26 PM EST- Posted in
- Memory
Final Words
"And the winner is..." really depends on how you plan to use your Value RAM. Some buyers ask nothing more than that their memory run at stock DDR400 speed as specified. If that buyer is you, then any of the seven memories that we tested here will meet your needs. All 7 of them ran at their specification or better without any problems at all. We would suggest that the CAS 2.5 memories are a bit faster and cost about the same as the Cas 3 we tested. Great choices here are the Kingston KVR400X64C3AK2/1G and the Transcend JM366D643A-50. 1 Gigabyte of either memory costs about $100 and they are sometimes on sale for even less. The Transcend is rated at CAS 2.5. The Kingston KVR400X64C3AK2/1G is rated at CAS 3, but we had no problem at all running the Kingston at CAS 2.5 at DDR400.The Kingston and Transcend stop at DDR450, and if your budget can stretch $21 to $121 for a Gigabyte of memory, the excellent OCZ PC3200 Premier will give you CAS 2.5 performance all the way up to around DDR480. This will cover the highest 1:1 overclock that you are likely to achieve with air cooling on any AMD Athlon 64 CPU. If your budget can stretch to around $195, you can buy famous Winbond BH5 again in OCZ PC3200 Gold. This will give you the absolute fastest 2-2-2 timings at DDR400 at default voltage - and a whole lot more if you want to overclock now or in the future. 2-2-2 timings are definitely faster, but we would choose a faster CPU over the faster RAM, if that is what the $95 represents in your budget, and you don't plan to overclock.
If you have any overclocking plans at all, exclude the other Kingston memory, Kingston KVR400X64C25/512, and Mushkin EM. They both had trouble even reaching a CPU clock of 205 on our test platform. There are much better choices for overclocking in this roundup. This may be a compatibility issue of these memory chips with the AMD on-chip memory controller or the DFI motherboard, but whatever the reason, they don't clock even modestly on our test bed. There are other choices available from both Kingston and Mushkin, and almost any choice will likely do better at overclocking than these two.
Last, we get to the Mad Overclockers category, or maybe the mad overclocker wannabes. There is an old southern saying that you can't make a sow's ear into a silk purse - another way to say, you can't get something for nothing. Two memories in this roundup challenge that old sage - OCZ PC3200 Gold or "Value BH5" and OCZ PC3200 Value Series or "Value VX". If you can supply the voltage, then these two memories will reward you with 2-2-2 performance all the way from DDR490 to DDR510. Considering that the king of 2-2-2, OCZ PC4000 VX, sells for about $270, these 2 memories are true bargains at $115 for Value VX or $195 for Value BH5. They will neither likely reach quite as far as 4000 VX, but they will come close. VX itself is still a great value at $270 when you compare its performance to other memories in the $250 to $400 price range.
You will need memory voltage up to 3.5 volts or so to reach these performance levels with VX or BH5, but the memory itself is cheap "sow's ear" pricing. Some overclockers get their greatest thrills out of pushing cheap parts to unheard of performance levels. That is why the Intel P4 2.4GHz Northwood became legend. These two memories fit that category. You will need an OCZ DDR Booster to supply the voltages on some motherboards, a voltage mod on others, or a new DFI nForce4 if you want up to 4.0V out of the box. But if you supply the voltage, these two memories will provide legendary performance.
The winner depends on your needs. Frankly, the Value VX deserves a Gold Award from someone simply for the incredible performance at chicken feed prices. The BH5 revival is similarly worthy. The OCZ Premier reaches DDR480 at CAS 2.5 and costs just $121, and the pair of $100 CAS 2.5's are a stellar value. There are quite a few winners in this roundup - the winner for you depends on how you plan to use your Value RAM. We hope that we provided enough information on each of these memories to make your choice for best Value RAM an easier decision.
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Wesley Fink - Tuesday, April 12, 2005 - link
#52-#55 - There are Part numbers for ALL the memories in the review in the chart on Page 2. OCZ responded in post #44 that the 3-4-4-8 and 2.4-3-3-8 were the same VX memory. The parts are rated at what they can do at standard voltage - not what they can do at 3.0V and above.#45 - Continuing your analogy. If a Ferrari (Value VX) were available for the same price as a Chevrolet Cobalt, then I think readers would expect me to include the Ferrari in my review of Value cars - despite the fact the Ferrari might need hard to find racing alcohol (3.0V to 3.5V) to run properly while the Cobalt only needed easy to find unleaded regular gasoline (2.6V).
adg1034 - Tuesday, April 12, 2005 - link
Isn't that what he did with the Value VX? Check out the article...Zebo - Tuesday, April 12, 2005 - link
How bout the real "value" modules which really are cheap and contain same chips as high end ram? Just not speed binnned but who gives a rats ass for that kind of value.Some I can think of right off top off head are:
Crucial's with micron G's = Ballistix for half price.
TwinMOS with Winbond VX = OCZ VX for less than half price.
Kingston VR with Hynix BT = All those high end sparkly packaged 4200 modules for half price.
And so on.
Meh not what I was expecting.
Hardtarget - Tuesday, April 12, 2005 - link
good article except for one thing! I wish you had compared generic Samsung OEM ram.I don't know about the US but in Canada right now OEM Samsung game is super cheap. you can get 1gig for 100 bucks canadian. It's incredibly popular.
Would of been a great starting point to the article and good to see how it compares to non oem versions.
Ranger123 - Tuesday, April 12, 2005 - link
I think you need to clear up the issue regarding Corsair not providing memory. Corsair's response indicates why they chose not to supply their Value Select parts, but it doesn't explain why no XMS modules were provided. At least a couple of the XMS kits meet your criteria and I assume that these are the parts they were referring to when they said that OCers should look at their parts that are "geared to performance and overclocking".I can see 4 possible reasons for Corsair's refusal to send an XMS kit:
1. Corsair misread the AT request and thought only the Value Select parts qualified.
2. Corsair doesn't want anything in their XMS line associated with the phrase "Value RAM".
3. As others have suggested, Corsair knew their modules wouldn't perform well and decided that no result was better than a bad result.
4. Corsair is using the same rotating chip trick on these XMS modules that they are on the Value Select, they're just not admitting it.
Given Corsair's reputation I would assume that it's one of the first two, but if Corsair is resorting to some questionable practices I think the AT community would want to know. Maybe you can contact whoever you deal with at Corsair and get an explanation.
Crassus - Tuesday, April 12, 2005 - link
When I saw the headline of the review I expected the review to be somewhat different, to be honest. The tests in itself are not bad at all, but if you still have the samples I ask you both in my name and the names off all the folks complaning about the voltages to perform at least some tests at Voltages around 2.8 - 2.9 Volts to allow us to see how these RAMs perform at other boards (e.g. nForce3+4) and how far they will go in MHz @1T.I, too, have to question the ethics of this review in the light of the recent debate. How do we know that the samples you tested are of the same kind as we can buy, if its up to the manufacturer to send you whatever they see fit? Especially when it comes to !value! parts I doubt it will be too much of a problem to recieve them through other channels who will not be as interested in the outcome of the review as the manufacturer (Retail chains or online shops?). You may even consider buying them yourself anonymously to remove any doubt and sell them off lateron. Shouldn't be too hard with a community like this one or an online auction site.
Cheers,
Crassus
Backslider - Tuesday, April 12, 2005 - link
I'd like to comment on my experince with Value and Special Edition type RAM.While recenly building a set of PCs, I was reading articles similar to this one. I was convinced that in order to get a good system with future potential of over clocking I would need to buy the more expensive (non-value) RAM.
I happly paid approx. 50% more for this "Extreme Memory", thinking it would be perfect for a stable system. However, after I built my pair of systems I ran into trouble.
One of the two systems failed to install Windows. And to make a long story short, I ended up with a bad pair of RAM. I RMA'ed them to and received yet another faulty set of RAM. Finaly, I sent them to the maufacturer for an RMA. This time I received a set that hardly squeek by at stock speed. Overclocking by even 1% means instant BSOD.
Since this happened, I've been buying Value RAM. (from a different manufacturer) And havent run into any problems yet.
I also find it interesting that the manufacturer of the faulty RAM that I received, declined to Anandtech's request for test samples. Also, there reasoning was a bit questionable considering that their out of their "XMS" line, I received 4 (pairs) of modules that all performed VERY differently. (1 great, 2 bad, 1 not worth the RMA)
Thats just my input, based on my experience and nothing more.
-Backslider
Den - Tuesday, April 12, 2005 - link
#54 (and 52).I agree, if you are certain you will never overclock you should just get cheap ram with ok timings at stock speed. Interesting that the timings on the picture that you mention (2.5-3-3-7) match what is in the article here.
I understand why the articles don't have links to buy it, but it really would help if they would at least include the manufacturer's part/model number, then we could be sure.
segagenesis - Tuesday, April 12, 2005 - link
#53 - Actually clicking on the image you can see the ram is marked differently than the newegg page (wtf!) as 2.5-3-3-7 in the picture but 2.5-4-4-8. Ummm...Unfortunately I must be somewhat critical when my eyes spin around an article that gives praise to memory for $115 yet doesnt mention *where*. Let alone just a single link to buy it at any price.
Now granted the Corsair value runs at 2.5-3-3-7 also and likely has little headroom for people who want more out of less, but I consider it a good deal for those like me who dont overclock memory. *takes a breath* With the OCZ being $148 off the same site vs. $87 Corsair, for stock performance its not exactly "value" to me unless you are an overclocker. More like "value if you take the risk". A damn shame Corsair would not submit samples.
Den - Tuesday, April 12, 2005 - link
re: #52http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?desc...
has timings a little closer but you are right, it sure would be nice if they put actual model numbers in the reviews instead of leaving us to guess.