Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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!
... Job seekers have been putting ONLY their best accomplishments on their resumes
... Advertisers are STAGING their product photo shoots
... etc
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.
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.
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!
Remember, the choke point in a running program is usually the memory. Once it's been read off the hard disk (which is a startup cost, but doesn't matter much after the first quarter second or two), and as long it isn't doing a lot of I/O, performance is highly tied to memory.
For the top of the line CPUs, if your memory isn't fast enough, you've wasted your money.
So with that in mind, I'd say an ~10% drop in performance is significant.
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.
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.
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"
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.
Hardly.
A DDR-667 chip (or more specifically, a PC2-5300 stick) is supposed to run at at 333 MHz. So one runs at 421 MHz and the other runs at 471 MHz. To me, it looks like both of those sticks are performing way faster than the specification requires.
Isn't this just the price the user pays for being too stingy to pay for a memory stick which is actually rated to run at 400 MHz in the first place?
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Corporations are ripping off its customers with rigged tests... I'm truly shocked.
They aren't necessarily rigging anything -- chip production runs always produce a range of qualities, and they're submitting the best they have. To not do so, especially when everyone else does, would be to sabotage your own reviews. There are no "unbiased" samples.
The only practical way to fix this is to establish a standard for what companies should send in -- preferably something like five to ten random chips that have passed basic testing.
It's tragic. Laugh.
What about the reviewers? To be accepting free samples (aka bribes) seems asking to get tricked like this. I doubt the review companies/reviewers care, as they kind of like their perks. A little like lobbyists and politicians.
The only magazine I know of that buys their test samples retail is Consumer Reports, and they do it for this reason (as well as to avoid any conflict of interest).
So what you're basically saying is, someone is using the product outside of the product's operating specifications, and then bitching because some other guy was able to use it *further* outside of the operating specifications.
I still don't see the problem here, except perhaps the problem that overclockers are a little too enthusiastic about saving those extra few dollars.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!