128MB PC133 RAM Roundup

Companies: Corsair Micro, Memory Man, Infineon, Samsung, Enhanced Memory Systems
Products: 128MB PC133 SDRAM
Street Price: Varies
Date Reviewed: July 15, 2000

And Now For The Tests!!!

Alright, enough of the history lesson and specifications (I kinda felt like Anand there for a minute). My main goal was to find if there was a difference in performance between the different memory modules when running at the same speed, and to determine the highest attainable bus speed that the memory will run stable at.

I will tell you now that any memory running at the same speed as another will give you identical benchmarks, except for the VCSDRAM which is a little bit different technology. The VC stands for "Virtual Channel", but we didn't test any of that memory, and the only place that I found that even sold it was Kingston.

To determine stability I used several programs that really stress the system and use a lot of memory. SPECviewperf, WinBench99, Sandra 2000, 3D Mark 2000, Quake 3 Arena, and Photoshop 5.5 were some of the core programs that I used (well probably Q3A was used a little more than the others), however several others were used in conjunction with this arena of tests. I started out at 133 Mhz, and bumped up the FSB until the system would no longer run stable. If you want to check out all the FSB settings that the 6VCA has, check out our review with spec's here.

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As you can see from the results, we are proud to announce that Memory Man's Mosel Vitalic PC133 DIMM & Corsair Micro's new PC133 CAS2 DIMM are the top performers, with Enhanced Memory Systems HSDRAM coming in just 4Mhz behind! If we actually had an award or official seal of approval than these three companies would definitely be worthy.... 

Unfortunately, not all memory modules would run at CAS2, the Samsung C75 would run at CAS2 but only at 133Mhz so I didn't include that in the graph. Also, the CAS2 modules wouldn't overclock any further when I switched them to CAS3, however the next jump from 154FSB was 160.

All of memory modules did perform past the 133Mhz spec that they were rated for, with the average being around the 141 Mhz area. Please remember that results will differ between different motherboards, memory, etc...

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