Anandtech Reviews Mushkin RAM

EisleyRocks writes "Trying to find the right RAM to satisfy your overclocking needs? Anandtech has reviewed the latest offering from Mushkin. From the article: 'For gamers who seek fast timings and high bandwidth at stock memory ratios, the Mushkin XP2-5300 is a very good choice. The same can be said for overclockers looking for the highest DDR2 clock speeds that they can find. There are a few memories that can go higher in speed than Mushkin DDR2, but there are very few current DDR2 modules that can do 3-3-3 timings to DDR2-700 and above, or DDR2 memories that can handle higher voltage as well as this Mushkin. For now, the Mushkin XP2-5300 is a good choice among DDR2 1GB modules in 2GB kits.'"

Comments

Re:Mushkin

[JonyEpsilon]

I don't see how much difference the PCB can make though: it's just an electrical connection to the chips, right? Sure, you can keep the circuits short and use really high purity copper but that's about it isn't it?

Not at all! It's all about preserving signal integrity between the components. Remember, at these speeds you shouldn't really think of the signals as plain-old electrical currents flowing down the tracks. They're really high-frequency radio waves propagating down waveguides. Think of where 400MHz lies in the radio spectrum - it's well above fm radio (in the uk, at least) and that propagates pretty well as a wave :-) The pcb's job is to guide these waves around, and this is trickier than you might think. You have to consider the effect of the dielectric circuit board (the fibre glass bit) and coupling between various tracks and layers in the board. Jony