Now that AMD has made the jump to DDR2, memory companies have been quick to announce new products, and none has been quicker than Corsair, which has teamed up with Nvidia to introduce SLI memory.
We tested Corsair's top-of-the-range 2GB PC2-8500 kit, which runs at 1,066MHz ( with a CPU FSB of 266MHz), making it the fastest DDR2 around. That said, the timings of 5-5-5-15 are slow, although the unique EPP profile allows for easy overclocking with compatible motherboards.
With the 1,066MHz Corsair memory, both of the AM2 boards reviewed in this issue gained a slight advantage over a Socket 939 system, but only in our video encoding test. The AM2 boards both scored 1.12 compared to the top score of 1.08 in our Socket 939 Labs test.
The Foxconn and Asus boards handled the Corsair differently when we turned on SLI memory. The Foxconn overclocked the FSB to 266MHz and dropped the CPU multiplier to 10, overclocking the CPU by 460MHz, whereas the Asus set the FSB at 244MHz, and the multiplier at 9, leaving the CPU speed effectively unchanged. As the Foxconn actually increased the CPU speed, it saw a much higher overall benchmark score of 1.62, compared to the board's stock score of 1.34.
With some manual tweaking, we were able to overclock the modules to 1.12GHz (a CPU FSB of 280MHz), but this required relaxing the latencies to a pathetic 6-6-6-18 and upping the voltage to 2.4V.
CONCLUSION
The EPP profiles make overclocking very easy, but more hands-on overclockers can push these modules higher, although the trade-off is rubbish latencies and a high RAM voltage. The downside, however, isn't the technical side of these modules, but the price of £340, which makes them almost £50 more expensive than the EPP-less Super Talent modules, which are better overclockers.
Author: Alex Watson
Corsair TWIN2X 2048-8500C5