OCZ Technology has become the worldwide leader as a maker of performance ram, or any ram for that matter. If you want your system running at peak performance and the best that it can be then you have to have OCZ ram in there.

They’ve sent me over their 2gig kit of PC2-6400 SLI-Ready ram, not only does it look really cool with the black heatspreaders and the Nvidia SLI logo in the center, it out performs top quality ram running at PC2-8500 speeds easily. This ram from OCZ also features an EPP mode that allows you to run at timings of 4-4-4-15 @ 1T, and I also found that it easily hits the 1100Mhz mark while overclocking. So read on to check it out, I’ve got tons of tests and benchmarks running under Windows Vista and XP…

OCZ DDR2 PC2-6400 SLI-Ready Edition Dual Channel 2Gig Kit OCZ2N800SR2GK

Reviewed by: Kristofer Brozio

Sponsor: OCZ Technology

Tech Specs,Features or the Basic Info:

OCZ DDR2 PC2-6400 SLI-Ready Edition Dual Channel OCZ2N800SR2GK

Specs:

800MHz DDR2

EPP 4-4-4-15 1T

(CAS-TRCD-TRP-TRAS)

Available in 2GB (2×1024) dual channel kits

Also available in a 1GB module

Unbuffered

SLI-Ready XTC Heatspreader*

Lifetime Warranty

2.1 Volts

240 Pin DIMM

Special Features:

NVIDIA SLI certified

2.3V EVP**

EPP-Ready

Part Numbers:

2GB Dual Channel Kit PN – OCZ2N800SR2GK

Description:

OCZ DDR2 PC2-6400 / 800MHz / NVIDIA SLI-Ready Edition / Dual Channel

—New OCZ PC2-6400 Memory Modules are NVIDIA nForce SLI Certified resulting in better performance with select NVIDIA nForce motherboards—

The new OCZ PC2-6400 SLI-Ready Series is equipped with NVIDIA Enhanced Performance Profiles (EPP) to optimize the modules’ performance on nForce SLI-based motherboards. OCZ exclusively engineered select high-performance modules with advanced SPD (Serial Presence Detect) settings to allow compatible motherboards to recognize and utilize the added information, ultimately increasing the performance potential of the entire platform.

OCZ PC2-6400 SLI-Ready memory modules are programmed to boot at 800MHz DDR2 with supremely fast timings of 4-4-4 1T. Only motherboards equipped with the custom-designed BIOS, such as those designed for NVIDIA nForce SLI MCPs, can detect the optimized SPD profiles and ensure the memory functions under the best possible conditions. The exclusive OCZ SPD specifications take out the guesswork and provide enthusiasts and gamers with significant overclocked performance with no manual adjustment or compatibility issues.

Each OCZ SLI-Ready module comes equipped with an exclusive NVIDIA XTC heatspreaders for the most efficient heat dissipation and a look that stands out like its performance. Additionally, all SLI-Ready memory is backed with toll-free technical support, the exclusive EVP (Extended Voltage Protection) coverage, and an industry leading Lifetime Warranty.

With the fusion of the sophisticated EPP memory specification and cutting-edge, high-speed OCZ DDR2 architecture, the PC2-6400 edition is the ultimate breakthrough for advanced SLI platform performance.

* XTC (Xtreme Thermal Convection) heatspreaders optimize the thermal management of memory modules by promoting greater airflow by means of micro-convection throughout what is usually the dead air space inside conventional heatspreader designs. In this manner, build-up of heat is avoided and thermal dissipation of the memory components is offloaded more efficiently through the honeycomb design. At the same time, mechanical stability is maintained.

**OCZ EVP (Extended Voltage Protection) is a feature that allows performance enthusiasts to use a VDIMM of 2.3V without invalidating their OCZ Lifetime Warranty.

A Better Look at Things

Of course the first thing we look at is the packaging, the OCZ Sli-Ready Memory comes in a green and black colored package to match the Nvidia color scheme. You can plainly see the two stick of PC2-6400 ram through the front of the package, while the back has essentially the same information I have listed on the previous page.

The heatspreaders are the OCZ XTC style, they look very cool, and keep your ram cool as well, both sides of the ram feature the SLI logo in the center, it resembles a case badge actually, and of course we have identifying stickers as well.

The stickers have the model number, speed, timings, product name and the OCZ Logo as well. This really is some great looking ram…

Installation, Testing and Comparison (Windows XP):

For testing under both Windows XP and Vista Ultimate I used my EVGA nForce 680i Motherboard (122-CK-NF63-TR) which is an SLI-Ready motherboard, so this ram is a perfect fit with it. In the BIOS you have to enable SLI-Ready memory for it to be fully registered by the system, once enabled my computer booted in EPP mode with 4-4-4-15 1T timings, very easy, very nice. My CPU is an Intel C2D 6420 running at 2.13Ghz.

Just a note, I did a few more tests in XP than I did in Vista as well XP is still the dominant OS out there right now…

Since this is SLI ram, we’ll check out the gaming benchmarks first off and see what we get for the results.

For my testing I’ve put this ram up against my Crucial Ballistix Tracer PC2-8500 ram, I’ve had it in my system for a while and thought putting this up against each other makes a nice showing.

First up we have an old stand by, FarCry, here I ran the benchmarks 5 times and averaged out the results to gets the scores you see in the graph. You’ll also notice the bottom score is the OCZ SLI-Ready Ram running at 1066Mhz. You’ll see the results for SLI enabled and not enabled as well. The settings were all maxed and a resolution of 1280×1024.

Far Cry

Res: 1280×1024

Demo: Pier

Pixel Shader: default

Antialiasing: 8x

Anisotropic Filtering: 16x

HDR: level 7

The scores show us that the OCZ ram is very good, we’ve got extremely close framerates even while running at much slower speeds, essentially the same overall.

Of course I had to throw Crysis in here since it’s one that can kill a system easily. The settings were all set to medium with a resolution of 1280×1024 for testing. Crysis has a nice features that allows you to benchmark you’re system, the results are from four passes averaged out.

The first is the Crysis CPU Benchmark:

You can see the OCZ ram shines when running with SLI enabled, something that you would expect from a ram names SLI-Ready..

Next test is the Crysis GPU Benchmark:

Here again we can see a bump in framerates with SLI Enabled and using EPP mode.

What would a review be without running a 3dMark Bench? So here we have 3dMark06 results:

Here we can see very close scores all around, but the Crucial is a bit better even with the OCZ running at 1066Mhz like the Crucial Ballistix is. Still very close…

Now we’re onto regular tests, first up we have SuperPi, the time to calculate to 1 million. Of course the lower the scores the better.

The Crucial comes in last, with actually the OCZ running in EPP mode coming in the fastest.

The next test is video encoding or recoding as the case may be, using TMPGEnc to to see how long it takes to encode or re-encode a video file. The file is an AVI file that is being converted to MPG. It is 3 minutes and 48 seconds long, with 5720 frames and is 70.5 MB in size. Of course here again the lower the score the better.

The results here are not surprising at all, speed is the winner here, so of course running at 1066Mhz gives us the fastest encoding times. Still we are talking only about one second difference.

Installation, Testing and Comparison Continued (Windows XP):

Now we have all the SiSoft Sandra Benchmarks.

SiSoft Sandra Cache and Memory test

Benchmark the processors’ caches and memory access (transfer speed).

Combined Index: is a composite figure representing the overall performance rating of the entire Cache-Memory performance in terms of MB/s. The value is the logarithmic average of all the results for the entire address space. (Higher is better, i.e. better performance)

Speed Factor: is a figure representing the speed differential between the CPU’s cache and memory. The value is the ratio of the fastest cache (i.e. L1) bandwidth to the main memory bandwidth. (Lower is better, i.e. the memory is not very much slower than CPU’s cache)

Here we can see that the EPP mode works well, and also running at 1066Mhz it bests the Crucial by a small margin.

CPU Arithmetic Benchmark

Benchmarks the ALU and FPU processor units. Shows how your processors handle arithmetic and floating point instructions.

Results Interpretation : Higher index values are better.

Again we can see EPP mode makes a difference in performance of the system, even non-EPP mode looks good as well. I find it amazing that ram running slower can come out on top…

Processor Multi-Media

Benchmark the (W)MMX, SSE/2/3/4 processor units. Shows how your processors handle multi-media instructions and data in comparison to other typical processors.

Such operations are used by more specialized software, e.g. image manipulation, video decoders/encoders, games.

Results Interpretation : Higher index values are better.

No surprise here again, lower speed better scores…

Memory Bandwidth Benchmark

Benchmarks the memory bandwidth of your computer.

Results Interpretation : Higher index values are better.

The Crucial Ballistix looses out all around in this test.. we can see the OCZ uses its bandwidth very efficiently…

Now we have the Memory Latency Benchmark.

Benchmark the latency (response time) of processors’ caches and memory

The latency of caches is measured in processor clocks (i.e. how many clocks it takes for the data to be ready) as it is dependent on the processor clock speed.

The latency of memory is measured in nanoseconds as it is typically independent on processor clock speed.

Results Interpretation : Lower index values are better.

Obviously running in EPP mode with CAS4 is better but as you can see running at 1066Mhz at CAS5 achieves a better score…

Multi-Core Efficiency

Benchmark the multi-core efficiency of the processors. Shows how efficient the processor cores and their inter-connects are in comparison to other types to other typical processors.

The ability of the cores to process data blocks and pass them to another core for processing (producer-consumer paradigm) of different sizes and different chain sizes is measured. The efficiency of the inter-connect between cores is thus benchmarked; however, the number of cores (and processors) also counts as more data buffers can be processed simultaneously (aka “in flight”).

True multi-core processors that have shared L2/L3 caches will thus perform much better than cores that have separate caches and are connected by the traditional FSB.

Inter-Core Bandwidth :Results Interpretation : Higher index values are better.

Inter-Core Latency :Results Interpretation : Lower index values are better.

and again we see EPP mode is the choice to go with… but we do have a nice bump in the score when running at 1066Mhz with the OCZ ram.

Obviously you saw this ram easily hit 1066Mhz, but I did get it to go to 1100Mhz as well, I couldn’t get much farther..

Installation, Testing and Comparison (Windows Vista):

First up we have a FarCry, here I ran the benchmarks 5 times and averaged out the results to gets the scores you see in the graph. The settings were all maxed and a resolution of 1280×1024.

Far Cry

Res: 1280×1024

Demo: Pier

Pixel Shader: default

Antialiasing: 8x

Anisotropic Filtering: 16x

HDR: level 7

Here we can see the Crucial pulls ahead a bit in framerates but not much, especially considering the speeds of the ram…

So here we have 3dMark06 results:

Surprisingly we see the Crucial pulling ahead while running with SLI enabled…

Now we’re onto regular tests, first up we have SuperPi, the time to calculate to 1 million. Of course the lower the scores the better.

Here, like under Windows XP the Crucial comes in last even though while running at faster speeds…

Here we see the OCZ at EPP mode pulling ahead while running at 800Mhz as opposed to the 1066Mhz of the Crucial.

Now we have all the SiSoft Sandra Benchmarks.

SiSoft Sandra Cache and Memory test

Benchmark the processors’ caches and memory access (transfer speed).

Here again OCZ running EPP mode is the better scorer…

CPU Arithmetic Benchmark

Benchmarks the ALU and FPU processor units. Shows how your processors handle arithmetic and floating point instructions.

Results Interpretation : Higher index values are better.

Very close but the OCZ is again the leader in performance.. not by much though

Processor Multi-Media

Benchmark the (W)MMX, SSE/2/3/4 processor units. Shows how your processors handle multi-media instructions and data in comparison to other typical processors.

Such operations are used by more specialized software, e.g. image manipulation, video decoders/encoders, games.

Results Interpretation : Higher index values are better.

As we can see by these results the speed of the Crucial is what’s needed for the best performance in this test, but the OCZ is very close.

Memory Bandwidth Benchmark

Benchmarks the memory bandwidth of your computer.

Results Interpretation : Higher index values are better.

There’s no match here, the CAS4 of the OCZ is the better performer even running at 800Mhz.

Now we have the Memory Latency Benchmark.

Benchmark the latency (response time) of processors’ caches and memory

The latency of caches is measured in processor clocks (i.e. how many clocks it takes for the data to be ready) as it is dependent on the processor clock speed.

The latency of memory is measured in nanoseconds as it is typically independent on processor clock speed.

Results Interpretation : Lower index values are better.

The Crucial is one nanosecond faster in this test, do you think you’ll notice a nanosecond?

Multi-Core Efficiency

Benchmark the multi-core efficiency of the processors. Shows how efficient the processor cores and their inter-connects are in comparison to other types to other typical processors.

True multi-core processors that have shared L2/L3 caches will thus perform much better than cores that have separate caches and are connected by the traditional FSB.

Inter-Core Bandwidth :Results Interpretation : Higher index values are better.

Inter-Core Latency :Results Interpretation : Lower index values are better.

Here we can see Crucial wins with the highest Inter-Core bandwidth speeds, I’ve a suspicion it has to do with the ram running at 1066Mhz, but the OCZ in EPP mode is the winner with lower Inter-Core Latency…

Summary:

This ram just rocks, not only can it run at nice tight timings, but it’s got a decent overclock and pretty much blows away the competition easily.

This is what you want to see in high quality ram, as you can see from my tests this ram easily runs circles around ram that is made to be faster. I was genuinely surprised that the OCZ Sli-Ready ram out-performed my Crucial Ballistix that was running at 1066Mhhz. I can easily recommend this stuff to anyone… This ram is available at PC2-8500 Speeds as well, I’ve got to get me some of that if the PC2-6400 can do this… wow

DragonSteelMods gives the OCZ DDR2 PC2-6400 SLI-Ready Edition Ram a 5 out of 5 score and our Editor’s Choice Award as well.

Pros:

-Fast

-EPP Mode low latencies

-Good overclocker

-Lifetime warranty

-Automatic settings on SLI-Ready boards

-Low price

Cons:

-None really

review# 346

OCZ DDR2 PC2-6400 SLI-Ready Edition Dual Channel 2Gig Kit OCZ2N800SR2GK

Reviewed by: Kristofer Brozio

Sponsor: OCZ Technology

A Better Look at Things

Post navigation