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Memory Manufacturers Could be Cheating
Mark Brown writes "Tom's Hardware is live-testing DDR2 memory products in order to determine whether memory manufacturers submit cherry-picked products for reviews. 'GeIL DDR2-667 that was claimed to be purchased performed worse than the review samples they got: 471 MHz for the review samples vs. 421 MHz for the retail memory.'"
It can't be too surprising...besides, is 50 MHz really that large a discrepancy?
Why go fast when you can go anywhere? O|||||||O
Oh, my, what ever will we do? Maybe the memory manufacturers should divorce and marry other companies.
In other words, set their affairs in proper order...
I never trust specs on any product I buy. For example, if I buy a hard drive the first thing I do is open it up, shake all the bits out it and count them. If they don't add up to exactly what is listed in the spec, I return it.
Oh dear lord, a company wants to make sure their product gets the best review possible and tests it before they send it.
I'm shocked!
Corporations are ripping off its customers with rigged tests... I'm truly shocked.
... Job seekers have been putting ONLY their best accomplishments on their resumes
... Advertisers are STAGING their product photo shoots
... etc
No way, there can't be anyone making dishonest or cheap mem... PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA
There's a reason why Consumer Reports buys all of their products for testing through normal retail outlets.
Obviously companies will test any unit they send out to be reviewed to make sure it works as well as it can. The question is, how many other units did they test? If they only went out and bought one other unit, and the discrepancy was that large, it could be that the unit they bought was defective. They would need to buy several units from several retailers, preferrably in geographically dispersed areas, to get a real feel for how well these things will perform on average.
If you read the EULA carefully, you will see the only guarantee storage of zeros above 421 MHz.
In order to evaluate this claim we need to know about the reliability of the test. What is the variance if the test is repeated many times on the same RAM? Without this piece of information we don't know if 50 MHz is a small or large difference, or if even if it is a real one.
Not surprising at all. Manufacturers do want to get the most positive reviews after all. Look at the hardware sites. Only rarely do you ever see reviews of value equipment rather than the latest top-end equipment. I do find it a bit of a shame though. 50 Mhz may not look like much, but for the enthusiasts that go after the best equipment regardless of price, or the person who needs the best possible specs for a system and is willing to pay, that 50 Mhz can mean the difference between a purchase and a pass-by. While I don't think Geil's doing anything different than any other manufacturer is likely to try, it does make me think twice about the claimed specs of their products.
I don't think the memory one is really cheating, but it is a little shady. The motherboard with the higher voltage on the other hand seems pretty deliberate.
The majority of reviews should use store bought components. And not only one, but a few of the same ones, and probably from different vendors. It is the only way to get a good idea of what consumers get. Obviously in the case of unreleased products, this doesn't work. But in those cases, you know there is a good chance the final product will have some changes anyway.
The "memory manufacturers" try to make it look like they run at more "MHz" than they actually do. Wait...
This might not come as a big surprise to anyone, but it's still pretty shitty.
Steve,
http://tail-f.net/
I wonder if chips selected for reviews are overclocked first (just a bit), knowing full-well that it'll last long enough to go through the review process and the warantees wont be expensive to honor on just a small percentage of product.
Latewire
Memory is rated to perform within certain specifications. If it doesn't perform well within this range, that's a legitimate complaint.
Tom's is complaining about something totally different. They are seeing how well the memory will overclock. But the manufacturer makes no claims about how well it will overclock. They explicitly tell you that they cannot guarantee what will happen. This is a reasonable position on their part.
But what Tom's is asking is for all memory from a given manufacturer to overclock the same. This is crazy. The manufacturer has every right to switch production methods and to make other changes which could affect overclocking performance. The only question should be: does the memory perfom as specified.
If you overclock your memory and it works well, good for you. But you have no right to complain if overclocking doesn't work as well as you want!
1) The article says that they bump the clock rate until the systems crash. ... just to carry on running with bad data.
... one for the review sample, and one for the retail purchased.
I'd be a little happier with running a memory test and running at progressively faster speeds until it detects an error. Some memory errors might not cause the system to crash
2) They have two "identical" systems
How do they know that all the components in the identical systems really have exactly the same specs? It would be more fair use just one system, or after the tests complete to swap the ram and re-run.
Not all people are honest!
"471 MHz for the review samples vs. 421 MHz for the retail memory.'"
Obvious answer, buy review samples.
The ram was rated as DDR2 667 even the retail at 421 MHZ. That comes out to DDR2-842 doesn't it?
The ram met and far exceeded it's rated clock speed. Sure the give good stuff to reviewers. If the review sites want to do valid tests of which brand of ram is the best for over clocking they would have to purchase multiple samples of each brand from the retail channel.
When overclocking the truth is your results may very. If you are pushing past specs then some will work and some will not. Heck even different production batches will give different averages.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Horsepower in cars rarely meets up with the numbers. Fuel efficiency, either. Carb content in food is labeled, but most people don't read the serving size, so that is advertising funk, too.
Why should this be different? When a company ships a product to be reviewed and tested, they'll ship the best. When they test their own, they'll test the best. You should NEVER accept that specs are factual, and you should spend some time confirming what you bought.
This is the great thing about specs -- if they're lies, just return the product. If a company lies enough, the customers will go elsewhere.
It is really all common sense.
Ok, prolly going to be flamed like a Buddhist monk in Vietnam for this but here goes... The standards we set for equipment are supposed to be across the board. Hence the term "standard" Smart people please tell me how many bits in a byte, how many bytes in a Kb, how many Kb in a Mb... etc. etc. etc. What ever happened to "standards" and the stoic facilities that govern them? All I have to say is until we make a stand about what is and is not acceptable consider yourselves the welcome mats to world industry and marketing. This goes for all the other stuff too. Ever see that commercial where the bathroom sink is just running and all these people are all aghast about it? Well there will be no quiet hero to the rescue to turn the bloody thing off in real life. Stop being a bunch of blue haired Nancy's and form a group that does just more than types. One person is a screwball, two are a conspiracy but several thousand are a force to be reckoned with. Put that in your pipe and smoke it!
http://www.hardocp.com/reviews.html?cat=MjUsRGVza3 RvcCBDb21wdXRlcnMsaGNvbnN1bWVyLCws
What they are doing is having other people buying systems and then reviewing those systems. They will only review systems where they have an agreement with the manufacturer that the computer can be returned at the end of the review. The key is that the manufacturer never knows who is getting a system which may be subject to review.
It actually works well for both parties. Some manufacturers are proactive in the forums and even acted on complaints received, strengthing their processes.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Hmmm... If I read this right, it looks like the motherboard that came w/ the memory had its voltage increased to induce higher speeds. This would skew any test - not just overclocking, unless you knew to reset it.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't DDR2-667 only certified to run at 333MHz? Either way, 471 MHz and 421 MHz are both well above that... It's not as if they're claiming it runs at 471 and it actually runs at 421... they're only guaranteeing it to run at 333... right?
From TFA:
"Its DDR2-667 memory......"
"maximum clock speed of 471 MHz, which corresponds to DDR2-942"
vs
"a memory clock of 421 MHz (DDR2-842)"
So its more than 20% faster than what it is rated at... Whats the big deal? Everyone knows there are certain processors/memory modules from the same exact part# that outperform others. This has been the case since before the Celeron 300a even. If the memory performed below its rating, then there would be a problem
If all of the manufacturers cheat, then none of them are cheating.
Recall the hubub from as recently as a half-decade ago, when video card manufacturers were rigging their drivers (or the cards themselves) to recognize when they were being asked to draw the same patterns over and over again (like, say, 10,000 colored boxes, or circles... like benchmark programs do) and would silently decide to perform only a fraction of them to jack the benchmark numbers up?
Never, ever trust the results from an item that the company sent you when they knew you were a reviewer. You should just go out and buy one off the shelf in a store. If you can't afford to do that, buy one from a store and ask the company for a review sample, return the sample to the store and test the, now free, one that you got "in the wild", as it were.
Unprofessional benchmarks and overclocking?
If Tom's Hardware has a problem with this perhaps they should stick to real-world benchmarks and purchase all the equipment they test for review, instead of trusting manufacturers to "help" them. Its very unprofessional of them to work so closely with the businesses they are supposed to be reviewing..
Let's see - the GeIL memory is rated at DDR2-533. The module from the vendor ran at DDR2-942. The module from the store ran at DDR2-842. Now, Tom makes this out to be some big controversy, but it seems to me that a module running 36% faster than specified is no small thing, particularly at that high of a data rate.
I'm an engineer who designs memory modules. In most cases, our modules are overclockable, at least to some degree - some go faster than others. At the sort of speed that Tom's Hardware is running, I'm not really surprised that there's more than a 2 or 3% variation in performance, espeically if the chips on those modules came from different manufacturing lots. At the outer limits of memory speed performance, the tiniest changes in parasitic capacitance can be death to performance - and those values change from lot to lot, even from wafer to wafer.
When manufacturers specify that 2% to 3% tolerance, they're referring to the module's performance at its rated speed, and that makes sense. Plug two modules into a system and they will run in virtual lockstep - at their rated speed. There are a million analogies that I could use, but the bottom line is that there are assumptions and statements in Tom's article that just aren't right.
Maybe the module was cherry-picked and maybe it wasn't, but, if nothing else, a sample of two doesn't make for much of a study. After all, if the retail module had been DOA, a pedantic person could say that GeIL cherry-picked the evaluation samples and sends all the defective modules to retail.
-h-
Get the writer loaded and laid.
Seriously. Many years ago, I worked as a technician for a (now defunct) major audio equipment manufacturer. When a writer from "Stereo Review" or "Audio" magazine came to visit, we'd play with the equipment a little, my Engineering boss would hand him some specs, and they'd go out on the town (leaving me to work the rest of the day {grumble, grumble}). A few months later, we'd see those exact specs printed in the magazine, along with some well-placed ads. I never believe a review I read in a trade publication.
Consumer Reports lacks technical expertise in many areas, but at least their approach has some level of integrity.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
The major difference is that these hardware sites are running the product through quantitative benchmarks to compare products. This throws doubt onto that whole entire notion of comparison.
If you could say.. foster that doubt sufficiently, you might be able to make a business out of buying and benchmarking hardware, hand picking the good stuff and selling it at a boosted price as "guaranteed best."
Then throw a "credited rating system" around it, and you could potentially have a nice little middleman racket like what card shops sort of have.
In computers, specs are very, very important. With RAM, the spec tells you the maximum frequency at which it is rated to run. So if the memory is DDR2 667, it is rated to operate at a maximum frequency of 333MHz (DDR values are doubled). You can try running it faster, it may work (that's what Tom was doing) but no gaurentees. However it is gaurenteed to operate properly, withoug stability problems at 333MHz or below.
Thus, if your system requires DDR2 667, you need to make sure you buy it, otherwise your system may crash, corrupt data, or simply fail to POST.
Computer specs are generally like engineering data: They are maximum safe ratings. The company gaurentees that the product will work up to and including this level, but not more. It may go higher, but you do so at your own risk.
Tuesday, April 10th? Wednesday, April 11th?
So if you want the best stuff, convince them you're a review site and just wait for them to ship you the cream de la creme.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
i work at hp, and i'm sure this is standard practice across every industry... all review units go through a series of stringent screening process to determine the absolutely best units.
seriously think about it.... if you had a hot date, would you show up in a yellow wife-beater, messy hair and bad breathe, and ask her to pay the cab that's been waiting for them for the last 30 minutes?
You're having problems with the megaHURTS?
She: Hey, are you a traitor? Me: No, I'm atheist.
Tom's Hardware and other reviewers may not be able to buy their tested items from retailers, but I can think of a great way to get retail items without any cost to them. When they receive a "cherry picked" piece of hardware they can post it on their website and ask for users to register to purchase a matching retail item to trade. The "winning" user can then get a retail part, ship it to the reviewer, and receive the primo hardware in return. This way the reviewer gets to test both parts, and the user has a good chance of getting a hand-picked piece of hardware. Win-win. Just an idea.
Accepting merchandise-even to use-opens one to the bribery effect. Accepting merchandise-even just to "review" -means that yes indeed you can get a cherry picked tweaked pristine example of the article in question.
It is just common sense bad mojo to accept stuff directly from the manufacturers for this sort of work.
the products behave well within their specifications. IMO overclocking is lots of hype over small differences. what i care for is a product that works well. and 90% (or more) of the customers feel exactly the same way (or are too ignorasnt to understand what overclocking is)
god, i wish sometimes that geeks were a tad bit more pragmatic, and would put themselves in the position of manufacturars (or anyone "regular" for that matter)
(no i don't deal in popular opinions. it's not my style)
Credit where its due: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weber-Fechner_law
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They say AMD stresses other components. It has been my experience for a couple years that if it says PC2700, for example, I better get PC3200 if I don't want lockups.
This would clarify a few things.
Memory should run at a rated speed. Any speed over that only matters if you overclock, I would think.
I could have told them that - every peice of OCZ, Geil, Kingston, Corsair, Crucial (overclockers type only), and Mushkin - that we see tests bad at standard clock speeds. If it's not bad when we first test it give it 2 months and the customer is back. So much better luck with Generic Samsung/Micron, DRAM Master or Supertalent branded sticks. People who pay 2x to 3x as much for "premium" ram are suckers anyway.
Consumer Reports lacks technical expertise in many areas, but at least their approach has some level of integrity.
CR takes an approach that is valuable to the very largest number of people possible. Their computer reviews are probably uninteresting to a computer expert, and their auto reviews to a mechanic. But they provide useful high-level information that has one terribly useful characteristic -- it can be trusted.
It is *unbelivably* difficult to get information that can be trusted when you have whole industries built around not just feeding misleading information to the consumer, a la advertising and marketing, but around figuring out how to mislead the people that feed information to consumers. Buy off or influence reviewers, get desired songs played on the radio, etc. I'm sure that advertising agencies will start addressing Wikipedia soon enough.
I agree that more specialization might be nice, but it's difficult to have a broad enough appeal to be completely subscription-funded and thus remain neutral if you become too specialized.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
My god, who can even read the article, that website is such a piece of utter shit. The article is divided up into 10 pages with only a couple of paragraphs on each page and a ton of flashing adverts.
Screw them.
I'm a slashdot geek and i am thinking "get a life"
sure this is one guy's experience with DDR2, but it's good stuff
crucial ddr2-667 doesn't perform well.
ocz gold ddr2-800 just doesn't work.
corsair ddr2-675 performs well above specs. and it's half the price.
in my abit AW8-MAX board with it's i955x chipset, I'm running the ram at 667MHz with timings of 4-4-4-12
I can clock the RAM to 220@3:5 or 733MHz!
as far as I can tell, the crucial ballistix I bought was stable at jdec specs.
the ocz gold didn't even post.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Given that lack of information, I may still be able to explain a bit... Though I no longer work for a memory manufacturer, I do work for a semiconductor manufacturer, and the failure mechanisms of chips are still the same (DRAM or not)...
It almost goes without saying that ECC memory is more expensive due to the extra chips involved, but I'll mention it for completeness.
It also (almost) goes without saying that part of what you are paying for is the brand... which is as much perception as reality... note there is value for you as well: A valuable brand often means the company will make replacements or reparations at low effort to you in order to protect the brand.
Outside of that, there are still a significant number of things that could differ between two seemingly identical DRAM modules.
Part of the difference may be testing. My last post on Slashdot actually talked about testing relative to consumer semiconductor chips. Memory works the same way, in that memory sold under longer warranty periods or designed for higher level systems (mainframe, server-class products, etc.) will have longer and more stringent testing cycles.
This testing actually takes multiple forms, both static (DC) and dynamic (AC) testing. At speed testing is also possible, but adds additional cost. There are even more testing options pre-packaging, as you can actually do process tests (testing resistance in specialized devices on the chip, etc.) in order to detect how centered the process was on a particular device. Often, there are additional I/O that are never pinned out in a package (but are therefore exposed on an unpackaged die) that can serve some of these specialized testing purposes. There are also tests that can detect how much the device varies across the chip - you'll see this latter item occasionally referred to as ACLV [across chip linewidth variation] - the lower the better, of course. Chips are now sensitive enough that significant ACLV can actually make a processor completely fail to operate.
Note also some of the higher priced memory may also be memory that was perfect yield off of the manufacturing line (didn't require blowing a fuse in order to get the memory to operate). [If you didn't know it, a 64Mb DRAM chip might actually have 72Mb of cells, the redundancy is to increase net chip yield] Using a fuse on a DRAM isn't a big deal if the defect was a spot defect, but other defect mechanisms might be more problematic.
Cluster defects are one example. These can be caused by a piece of dirt skidding across the wafer as it is spun, leaving a trail of destruction which can be seen as a large arc across the wafer. Cluster defects often include both large defects that will cause measurable failures that require fusing as well as small (often undetectable) defects that degrade performance. These smaller defects often show up as soft error rates that appear above the intended design point of the memory. Since this requires significant at-speed testing to detect, they can slip through testing. However, many manufacturing lines do significant (if not complete) wafer inspection at each process stop, so the company may know which chips were subject to cluster defects and avoid packaging those as high-end memory. (I don't know that any companies do this, I'm just saying that the existing technology makes such a process possible - it might be too expensive to make it practical, however)
Additionally, a timing problem due to an overly thin layer somewhere in the process could demonstrate systemic defects due to electromigration (or other lifetime effects) during the latter part of the life of the s
Can anyone even tell me if DDR2 is an official standard yet? Because last I heard, it wasn't - and that was AMD's reason for never supporting it. AFAIK, DDR2 is basically just a rogue project for overclockers. Like anything else designed for overclocking (Motherboards, Graphics Cards), the OC editions are never exact anyways.
I hate you fucking AC's who "fp" all the time spamming Slashdot. Just fuck off you fuckers and leave us alone!!!!!!!!
To buy something from the store with the intention of returning it is fraud. To have the intention to return something else as if it were what you bought is at least as bad (legally).
Please don't think you can use stores as lending libraries.
I don't know if I want to get my reviews from individuals who would defraud stores out of money (handling/restocking fees, turning their stock into non-new stock which doesn't fetch the same price).
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Ask Ford or Mazda (again Ford) about this. Both companies doled out lots of money because they sold cars that didn't make the HP they claimed (Ford Mustang Cobra and Miata, respectively). Infiniti also had to spend a lot of money on their Q45 customers trying to make up what seemed to be a HP deficit (although I don't know if it was ever proven) in the Q45.
Car companies do test their cars, and the HP at the shaft (BHP) is supposed to be at least what is advertised, or else. So usually it is. There was a good story in the Detroit News recently about how companies were retesting their cars under a more standard set of rules now, and the ones that didn't match up well (either over or under). In this case, the companies aren't liable, because it is assumed their cars made the rated HP, but under different testing conditions. This loophole is now closed and cars going foward must be tested independently under these rules.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Where the heck is the surprise in this "revelation" ? Of course a manufacturer is going to "cherry pick" from their product range for testing, they want their product to look as good as it possibly can!
ERROR ERROR Sig too long Sig will now END.
The review itself is pretty meaningless. It is indeed likely that the chip manufacturer provides a cherry-picked sample when it knows that it is being reviewed, but comparing that with a sample of 1 is pretty well meaningless. I thought Tom's Hardward could do better than that.
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Many car reviews are done in pre-production cards that other auto journalists have already beaten the heck out of, and are in worse shape that one you'd drive off the lot. The better reviewers mention shortcomings in their reviews to do you the favor of letting you know the weak spots to look for to see if they've kept up on their promises to the reviewer.
I really have no contention with the issue if manufacturers would publicly admit to consumers the threshold for their product. I'm not just talking about hardware hear. I'm talking about fat calories (+/-), gas pumps, etc...
Humans beings are not perfect but, we can become more perfect if we know how less perfect we are...
While I agree that it's true that people should expect that nothing is guaranteed if you overclock the memory beyond its specification, you have to remember that manufacturers are submitting their memory to THG for testing specifically KNOWING it's going to be OCed! They want to look as good as possible. Sure, a FooCo-533 may perform just as good as a BarCo-533, but if the FooCo-533 fails when overclocked 566 and the BarCo-533 doesn't, BarCo comes out looking like they have a higher-quality product. And even if the consumer doesn't intent to overclock his memory, might he not feel SAFER with the BarCo memory? After all, if the FooCo memory can't handle a litte overclocking, how many FooCo-533 modules are unreliable even at 533? Such a conclusion is not logical, and not supported by the evidence, but it is how some consumers think.
But perhaps more to the point, pointing out how a manufacturer's memory sample may not be representative of retail quality isn't so much as to say "Gotcha!" to the manufacturer, but rather to help the hardcore computer hobbyists KNOW which memory they can trust to overclock. If Tom's doesn't test retail-quality memory, then the consumers can't necessarily trust the results. By providing a comparison study like the current one, it actually does help them evaluate products better, regardless of the fact that they're using these products out-of-spec.
Bruce
If you have no intention of keeping it when you bought it, then you only pretended to buy it. You had one thing in mind ("borrowing" the item), and you did another (pretended to purchase the item) and it cost someone else money (the company), so you committed fraud. It's that simple.
If a store has to raise their prices to cover someone else's acts of fraud, it bothers me, because it hurts me. And if you owned the company, I'm sure you'd be concerned too.
Crimes aren't okay just because you don't happen to know personally the person you are hurting.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
really with a sample size of 2. freaking 2 they conclude that mem makers are shipping slower memory to retail. TOMS HARDWARE needs to attend high school. such a small smaple size can not prove anything. now if they had compared some 50/100 mem sticks from diffrent retailers all the country /world then i'd accepted that maybe their conclusion holds some weight.