Corsair TwinX1024-3200LLPro PC3200 Dual Channel Kit and Transcend PC4000 512MB Review Author: Alan Wong Date Posted: December 7th, 2003 Corsair TwinX1024-3200LLPro 1GB DDR400 Dual Channel Kit SLRating: Transcend TS64MLD64V5F DDR500 512MB SLRating: Bottom Line: If you want to tweak a bit extra out of your kit then its important to get good RAM. We evaluated two sets of RAM from Corsair and Transcend against gaming/system benchmarks, there was a difference, if you want to overclock which would be the best option for you, read on to find out in our official review............ Article Navigation Introduction Corsair TwinX1024-3200LLPRO Dual Channel Kit Transcend TS64MLD64V5F 512MB DDR500 Test Setup Gaming Benchmarks System/RAM Benchmarks Overclocked Results Conclusion Corsair TwinX1024-3200LLPro 1GB DDR400 Dual Channel Kit Transcend TS64MLD64V5F DDR500 512MB Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 >> Discuss This Article

Corsair TwinX1024-3200LLPRO Dual Channel Kit

Corsair is a very highly recognized company for their very overclockable and reliable RAM. The TwinX1024-3200LLPRO holds strongly to that reputation. The kit consists of two 512MB sticks of Extra Low Latency PC3200 (DDR400).

The TwinX1024-3200LLPRO is a Dual Channel Memory Kit. For those who don’t know, Dual Channel architecture requires 2 sticks of (preferably) identical RAM sticks and are installed on two independent RAM channels on the motherboard. By installing RAM on 2 independent slot channels (instead of installing 2 sticks on 2 shared slots), the maximum bandwidth is doubled to 6.4GB/s (rather than 3.2GB/s on regular non Dual-Channel Boards). Only a few chipset motherboards support Dual Channel Architecture. The most popular AMD chipset that supports Dual Channel Architecture is the Nvidia nForce2 Series chipset. There are also other chipsets that supports Dual Channel for Intel systems as well. More information about Dual Channel Architecture can be found here: http://www.houseofhelp.com/forums/showthread.php?s=4eb3e971130ca34e36fa3fab1248ce30&threadid=10156

The heatspreaders of the sticks are quite unique and is different than any other kind of RAM on the market. On top of the heatspreader is a series of LED lights which light up to show activity of the RAM. They look pretty cool when they are working correctly but when they aren’t they, can be quite annoying. I’ll go into details of that in the overclocking section of the review.

Each stick has an impressive Low CAS Latency of 2 (or 2.0, whichever you prefer). CAS Latency stands for Column Address Strobe Latency and it indicates how many cycles it takes for data to appear on the pins on the RAM. In short, the lower the CAS Latency, the more of a performance boost you will receive. Also, there is also a thing called timing. It is usually expressed in a series of numbers in the format of x-x-x-x. Like CAS Latency, the lower the number, the better the performance. The timing for the Corsair TwinX1024-3200LLPRO is 2-3-2-6, which is very low (thereby increasing performance). However, that does not mean that memory with CAS Latency 2 is 33% faster than CAS Latency 3. There are many factors that affect the performance of RAM and CAS Latency is just one of the factors that affect the performance of RAM.

More details about CAS Latency and Memory Timing can be found here: http://www.corsairmicro.com/main/trg-cas.html/ .

When overclocking, I was limited by my FSB and motherboard to overclock any more than 221.8MHz at a CAS Latency of 2 and a timing of 2-3-2-6. This was nonetheless very impressive, since I was able to keep the timing the same as it was when not overclocked. Also, no additional voltage was required. For those who are willing to overclock their FSB in synchronization with their RAM, the Corsair TwinX1024-3200LLPRO leaves a lot of headroom for overclocking.

The only bad thing with overclocking with the TwinX1024-LLPro (at least when not adding additional voltage) is that the LED lights are easily screwed up. When you do overclock, the lights do not illuminate as much and do not show as much activity as before. The only time it ever illuminates all its lights is when it is under heavy load (e.g. games, benchmarks, etc.) but other than that, the lights are relatively idle and only the first 2 LEDs light up.

Transcend TS64MLD64V5F 512MB DDR500

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Article Navigation Introduction Corsair TwinX1024-3200LLPRO Dual Channel Kit Transcend TS64MLD64V5F 512MB DDR500 Test Setup Gaming Benchmarks System/RAM Benchmarks Overclocked Results Conclusions

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