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Review: Patriot PDC22G9200ELK high-speed DDR2 memory

by Tarinder Sandhu on 25 July 2007, 08:49

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System setup and notes


HEXUS test PC and memory specs

Memory Patriot PDC22G9200ELK Corsair DOMINATOR TWIN2X2048-10000C5DF Kingston HyperX KHX9600D2K2/2G OCZ Reaper HPC Edition PC2-9200
Memory Timings and Speed 1150MHz, 5-5-5-12 2T 1250MHz, 5-5-5-18 2T 1200MHz, 5-5-5-15 2T 1150MHz, 5-5-5-18 2T
CPU Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 (3.00/3.019GHz, 4MiB L2 cache, 1333/1342MHz FSB, LGA775) - see notes below
Motherboard eVGA NF68 (NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI)
BIOS revision 691N0P20
Graphics Card 2x Asus GeForce 7900GTX 512MB (SLI ENABLED)
Disk drive(s) Seagate 160GB SATAII (ST3160812AS)
Mainboard software NVIDIA platform driver 9.53
Graphics driver ForceWare 91.47
Operating System Windows XP Professional 32-bit with SP2
Approx price at time of writing £158 £469 £137 £159

Tests

2D Benchmarks ScienceMark Memory Bandwidth
ScienceMark Memory Latency
CPU-Z Latency
SiSoft Sandra Memory Bandwidth
HEXUS DivX encoding

3D Benchmarks Far Cry v1.33
Quake 4 v1.30

Setup notes

The eVGA NF68 motherboard was chosen because its NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI chipset allows independent setting of the speed of the memory and the front side bus.

Other chipsets, such as Intel's P965 and P35, don't have that ability, so the memory speeds available are dictated by speed set for the front side bus and the memory-multipliers offered by the chipset.

We've added in results from other high-speed memory we tested recently. Click back to that review to see how slower-clocked PC6400 memory compares.

For the Patriot and OCZ modules, we had to run the CPU at 3019MHz with a 1342MHz FSB - because of the memories' peculiar speed-grade and because of chipset limitations.

For the Corsair and Kingston memory modules, the CPU was run at 3000MHz with a 1333MHz FSB (rather than the stock 2933MHz frequency with a 1066MHz FSB).

For our standard tests, the Corsair DOMINATOR XMS2-10000 was run at 2.4V - as per spec - whilst all others were run at 2.3V.

Temperatures

Memory Patriot PDC22G9200ELK Corsair DOMINATOR XMS2-10000
(with DOMINATOR Airflow fan)
Corsair DOMINATOR XMS2-10000
(without DOMINATOR Airflow fan)
Kingston HyperX KHX9600D2K2/2G OCZ Reaper HPC Edition PC2-9200
Ambient temperature 24C 23C 22.5C 19.5C 24C
Temperature after 30 minute stability test 38C 32.5C 37.5C 39.5C 36.5C
Temperature delta 14C 9.5C 15C 20C 12.5C
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Considering that no extra airflow is directed at the Patriot modules, the heatspreaders perform well, beating out the Kingston modules and almost matching the heatpipe-clad OCZ Reapers.