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!

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.

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.