DDR2 Roundup: Reaching for 667 and Beyond

Kingston PC2-4300 Value RAM

As one of the largest retail and OEM memory suppliers, Kingston produces a huge amount of DIMMs for the world market. As with other finished memory makers, Kingston uses chips from chip manufacturers like Micron, Samsung, Elpida, and others. They then assemble the memory from selected or custom PCBs, and market the finished memory product in the retail and OEM channels.

Kingston supplied a pair of Value RAM for the DDR2 roundup. Value RAM is among the most reasonable of the Kingston memory offerings, and they are not specially selected chips such as those used in the Kingston HyperX series, for example.

Test DIMMs were a matched pair of single-sided 512MB DDR2 PC 4300 DIMMs without heat spreaders.

Kingston uses the high-density Elpida chips in their DDR2. This means that they can also easily produce a double-side 1GB version using the same Elpida chips.

Test Results: Kingston PC2-4300 Value RAM

The full suite of benchmark tests were run at all memory speeds. This includes Quake3, Super PI, Sandra 2004 SP2 Memory Tests, Aida 32 Memory Tests, and Return to Castle Wolfenstein-Enemy Territory. We also ran UT2003, Aquamark 3, and Comanche 4 at every memory speed to verify stability of the reported memory timings. All benchmarks and additional tests had to complete without incident for the memory settings to be considered stable.

Kingston PC2-4300 (DDR2 533) - 2 x 512Mb Single-Bank
Speed	Memory Timings & Voltage	Quake3 fps	Sandra UNBuffered	Sandra Standard Buffered	Super PI 2M places (time in sec)
533DDR 800FSB	4-3-3-10 1.8V	367.2	INT 2877 FLT 2952	INT 4886 FLT 4890	108
667DDR 1000FSB	4-4-4-10 1.9V	456.1	INT 3524 FLT 3560	INT 6064 FLT 6084	86
686DDR 258FSB	4-4-4-10 1.9V	465.8	INT 3650 FLT 3693	INT 6232 FLT 6235	85

Kingston PC2-4300 (DDR2 533)
Speed	RCW-ET Radar	Aida 32 Read	Aida 32 Write	Aida 32 Total
533DDR 800FSB	78.0	5353	2008	7361
667DDR 1000FSB	97.3	6543	2392	8935
686DDR 258FSB	99.5	6796	2494	9290

The Kingston Value Ram was an average performer in our tests. We do not know whether this is a result of the single-sided design of the 512MB modules or the result of the Elpida chips performing somewhat poorer than the Micron chips used in Crucial, Micron, Kingmax, and Corsair. The performance is about what you would expect from a bargain DIMM, except for the fact that even the Kingston Value ran without incident at DDR2 667 and at the highest speed DDR2 686, at the same timings and modest voltage settings. The Kingston required slightly slower 4-3-3 timings at DDR2 533 than the DIMMs with Micron chips, but the timings and required voltage at 667 and 686 matched the best in our roundup.

In case the developing message is not clear enough, every memory that we have tested so far in this roundup is able to run at DDR2 667 and DDR2 686 with complete stability. In almost every case, the 667 timings required are 4-4-4 instead of the slower JEDEC 5-5-5 standard. The voltage required for 667 and 686 operation is almost a modest increase to 1.9V from 1.8V in most cases.