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.'"

Comments

O'RLY

[Hinhule]

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!

In Other News...

[MudButt]

... Job seekers have been putting ONLY their best accomplishments on their resumes
... Advertisers are STAGING their product photo shoots
... etc

Well, duh!

[bwcarty]

There's a reason why Consumer Reports buys all of their products for testing through normal retail outlets.

Tom's has nothing to complain about

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:Tom's has nothing to complain about

[poot_rootbeer]

the manufacturer makes no claims about how well it will overclock.

THANK you.

Since the retail product and review sample were both rated as DDR2-667 (or is it 553? Depends on whether you're reading page 2 or page 2 of the "article"), neither one needed to perform reliably at memory clock rates any higher than 333.5MHz. That the retail product didn't fail until it was overclocked to 25% more than its rating suggests to me that it's solid kit.

I would also hesitate to conclude from the findings that any hardware vendor routinely sends out review samples that outperform retail units. We only have TWO data points here, not enough to extrapolate any type of meaningful findings. For all we know, a different review sample from the same manufacturer would fail at only 340MHz.

methodology questions

[Anonymous Coward]

1) The article says that they bump the clock rate until the systems crash.
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 ... just to carry on running with bad data.
2) They have two "identical" systems ... one for the review sample, and one for the retail purchased.
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.

I don't really see the problem

[LWATCDR]

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.

Specs are for advertising.

[dada21]

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.

Naive

[jemenake]

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.

PLEASE don't tell me that you're surprised by this. In fact, you should be surprised if it isn't happening.

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.

Re:Is this a surprise???

[Trejkaz]

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?