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

Test Setup:

For our testing we use an Intel 2.4C processor. The reason for this is that it has a low multiplier. The lower multiplier helps to achieve much higher FSB's since we will also be overclocking the CPU. We have tested the CPU to run up to 260FSB, 100% stable. At 260 the memory would have to run at 520 MHz DDR, so this should be plenty of CPU to max out almost any memory. For our testing procedure, we used MemTest86 to check for stability and SiSoft Sandra 2003 for our benchmarks. Also if we say stable, it means that the memory was stable through endless loops of MemTest86. If the memory could not run through MemTest86 without giving errors, we didn't even bother to boot into windows and run the benchmarks.

Results & Overclocking:

Starting out with the SPD timings set in the BIOS, we used CPU-Z to make sure the timings were correct. CPU-Z showed 2.5-8-4-4 instead of 2.5-7-4-4. This is not a serious issue because users can manually change the timings and we are not quite sure if it is our board or the memory that was causing the timings to be off. We decided to leave the timings the way they are because there are users who do not like fooling around with the timings but would rather just raise the FSB. At stock voltages for this motherboard the memory ran flawlessly at the rated 466MHz DDR.

Going any higher than the stock speed of 466 resulted in errors during Memtest86. So we started upping the voltage to try to get things stable. At 2.75V the memory would still not run stable at 470, which is odd because that is only a few MHz over the rated speed. We then tried 2.85V and the memory was running Memtest86 overnight. The memory was able to go all the way up to 480MHz but no higher. If you have a volt modded board and can go higher than 2.85V then maybe you could squeeze some more out of the memory but we were stuck at 480MHz  using the SPD timings.

Next we tried different timings, mainly adjusting the CAS too see if we could run high speeds at CAS 2 and we also tested out lighter timings to see if we could get an increase in memory speed. Oddly if we changed the CAS at all, the system would not boot. We have seen issues like this before with other memories not wanting to run different timings than what they are rated at. Perhaps this was a flaw with just the sticks we had especially with the somewhat low overclocking results.