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  • rallyhard - Friday, June 23, 2006 - link

    NOTE:
    Under "Anandtech Deals" at the top of each page of the review, there is a link called " Mushkin 2 x 1 GB PC2-5300 DDR2 RAM". This link will take you to Mushkin part #991382 memory, which that page will tell you has 4-4-4 timings. Newegg will tell you this RAM has 5-5-5 timings. In any case, the RAM this link refers to is not the same stuff that they reviewed. The reviewed RAM is 3-3-3 timings, which I'm assuming must be Mushkin part #991512.
  • artifex - Tuesday, March 28, 2006 - link

    Wow, last time I had a warranty return at Mushkin, I just emailed them their serials and they shipped me replacements overnight with my credit card as collateral for the return. Of course, I bought from their website, not from a retail store... but there was no talk of packaging. What packaging? :)

    Has Mushkin changed owners?
  • bldckstark - Tuesday, March 28, 2006 - link

    On page 7 you show the Mushkin memory at the top of the graph with 65.1 and all other memories have lower times. To be consistent with all of your other graphs the rankings are apparently reversed since the super pi results are "lower is better", and the Mushkin should have finished last, not first and be on the bottom of the graph, not the top. Unless I forgot to take my medicine today, again, and I am reading the article upside down, again.

    Nice article. I'll keep waiting for the latencies to come down so that we might see some life out of AM2 against Conroe.
  • Wesley Fink - Tuesday, March 28, 2006 - link

    The Super Pi chart is now in Ascending order as it should be. Thanks for bringing this to our attention.
  • Pirks - Tuesday, March 28, 2006 - link

    I recall buying some Mushkin stuff a long time ago. A HUGE price AFAIR and then one DDR stick died and they replaced it no questions asked. But now, after checking out their prices and seeing noname 2 GB DDR sticks for $200 CAN TOTAL (!) in my local store... well, guess which way I went. Now 2GB with the same price as Mushkin's EXTRADUPERFAST 512MB is soo sweet, no swap in XP and stuff... not saying Mushkin is bad, it's just so nice to spend $$$ on the AMOUNT of memory, not the speed. Sometime I'll get 4GB of noname sticks and make myself a hefty RAM disk and outrun those Raptor boasting kids, hehe :))
  • artifex - Tuesday, March 28, 2006 - link

    Pirks, spend a little more for name brand, even if not high-performance. That $20 or so you save up front isn't going to look so good if you ever have a memory glitch that causes you to lose data.

    I buy Mushkin, but only for machines that I'm going to be building at the margins of their rated specs, intend to overclock, etc. I feel like Mushkin sticks might be just a little more solid for that.

    I don't overclock all my stuff, though, and for just regular performance that is solid, like in my Mac Mini, I use Crucial. I wouldn't go with a no-name. And I never, ever, would buy loose sticks from a place like Fry's. :)
  • Pirks - Wednesday, March 29, 2006 - link

    quote:

    I wouldn't go with a no-name. And I never, ever, would buy loose sticks from a place like Fry's


    That's because you don't know what www.memtest.org is :P
  • Inkjammer - Tuesday, March 28, 2006 - link

    I've not seen enough of a performance boost from the "elite" memory to justify the price. Now, I say this, and I have 2GB of Kingston HyperX memory in my system. I swapped it out for 2GB of regular Kingston Value RAM and the performance difference was minor at best. If I weren't running a benchmark on it via SANDRA I'd never have even noticed.

    It seems to be geared to overclockers primarily, or people who just wanna pimp their rig. I think you could take the extra $200 for 2GB and invest in a beefier CPU or graphics card and really, REALLY see a performance difference.
  • WxChaser - Tuesday, March 28, 2006 - link

    Mushkin was the first memory company to produce enthusiast memory using the Elpida chips, allowing them to overclock very well at tight timings for DDR2. These modules will provide excellent performance for Intel DDR2 motherboards, and migrate quite well to the AMD socket AM2 when those platforms are released later this year.

    Please note that Mushkin has revamped their main web presence recently, and markets to 3 main target groups now. These are enhanced performance, high performance, and extreme performance. The XP2 PC2-5300 modules we tested were the extreme performance category - in other words aimed at the overclocking and gaming niche markets primarily.

  • Inkjammer - Tuesday, March 28, 2006 - link

    I'd still love to see a comparison on RAM between standard and enthusiast and stock speeds. I know that the built in spreaders are fantastic for heat dissapation, but how much added performance is gained for the extra money?

    Granted, I have enthusiast RAM, so... don't think of me as a hypocrit, but I still ponder just how much better this RAM is if you're not overclocking to the MAX.
  • PrinceGaz - Tuesday, March 28, 2006 - link

    "I know that the built in spreaders are fantastic for heat dissapation"

    There is a lot of debate over whether heatspreaders made any difference at all even with the hotter running DDR modules at 2.5V+. Many people believe the heatspreaders are more to do with making them look good rather than perform better. I really don't know either way as all the heatspreaders on my DDR modules seem to do is give a larger flat surface area for the heat to be dissipated from after the heat has been conducted from the individual chips (the heatspreaders even with overvolted modules don't feel particularly warm), and I'm unconvinced if
    (a) there is any significant surface area in contact between the chips and heatspreader, let alone whether any thermal compound was used
    (b) that might mean you would get better heat dissipation *without* a heatspreader as the cool air would be blowing directly over the memory chips themselves instead of having a heatspreader in the way

    Given that DDR modules at normal voltages (up to 3V anyway, I'm not talking about the OCZ modules that could take 3.5V or so -- more than old SDRAM even) without getting very warm, why would cooler running DDR2 need heatspreaders unless pushed up from 1.8V to at least 2.3V. Memory chips don't give off much heat even when over-volted so heat-spreaders seem unnecessary, especially on DDR2 modules. Once you combine that with the fact that at least half the surface area of a memory module without a heatspreader is taken up by the memory chips anyway, there doesn't really seem much point in adding something to "spread" the heat over what is only a slightly larger area.

    I will concede that heatspreaders look good though, and the minimal cost of them is returned many times in every premium module they sell with them.

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