GeIL Golden Dragon PC3700 DDR RAM

Company: GeIL
Product: Golden Dragon PC3700
Street Price: $170 USD
Date Reviewed: August 27, 2003
Reviewed By: Joey Chao

Up Close and Personal Look:

As with the past memory modules we have reviewed from GeIL, the Golden Dragon series is very elegantly packaged. The container looks like a traditional Asian box. It looks so nice that you probably would not want to throw it away, but rather show it off to your friends. The package is tri-folded and has the memory specifications on the inside panels. The middle panel holds the two sticks of memory and the way the packaging is designed it is almost like you should set it on a mantel above the fireplace for display. Nice packaging looks great, but we are more concerned with how well this memory is going to overclock.

The Golden Dragon series looks much different from any other modules we have reviewed to date. The 6-layer PCB is golden colored hence  the name Golden Dragon. As you can see from the pictures above there are no heat spreaders. Instead there is just a strip of acrylic covering the memory chips. As we stated earlier, these memory modules use Wafer Level Chip Scale Packaging, meaning that the chips are directly on the PCB without any wiring or legs that you would normally see on TSOP chips. The end result is less noise and cooler modules. This would also explain why there are no heat spreaders.

On the far side of the memory there is the sticker indicating the type of memory modules and the timings that they are rated to run. The sticker obviously reads PC3700 (DDR466),  but the timings are 2.5-7-4-4. These timings might not seem aggressive, but the latest Intel chipsets have a hard time running tight timings at high speeds. Also not that this memory is single sided which some overclocks believe allows for higher clocks due to less density and noise.

In the picture above, you can see the WLCSP chips a little better. Each one has a little design and are marked as 32MB. There are 8 chips on each stick equating to 256MB per stick. Also if you look at the dragon on the edge of the PCB, there is a red LED where the eye should be. This "Dragon Eye" indicates that the memory modules are on, but most people would probably already know if they were. While the machine is powered on the LED shines but not extremely bright. We doubt that many would even notice that it was there.