Memory Bandwidth vs. Latency

Higher bandwidth or lower latencies?  Until now, you'd had to choose one or the other.  In fact, that is why it almost seems that the market has reversed rather than improved when it comes to memory timings.  In order to achieve higher FSB rates in overclocked Pentium 4 systems, manufacturers have to sacrifice a lot when it comes to memory timings and is why a majority of DDR400+ modules on the market have such high rated latencies.  Being able to provide the user with the best of both worlds is a major obstacle to cross. Corsair, however, has managed to do just that with their new XL series memory modules.  XL stands for "Xtra-Low" Latencies and is exactly what these modules offer.  They are able to run completely stable at the extremely aggressive latencies of 2-2-2-5 and with just slightly higher latencies, they are able to still maintain stability at higher clock speeds.
 

Plug-n-Frag Technology

**click to enlarge**

Corsair’s trademarked technology provides advanced latency values pre-programmed into the SPD (serial presence detect) chip on each module. For the overclocker, this means that the XL modules automatically boot up at extremely aggressive 2-2-2-5 latencies with no additional BIOS tweaking.  On our Soyo Dragon 2 Platinum, they did indeed report the default lower timings and there was no need to manually change them.

Before we get into overclocking and our performance results, let's briefly take a look at our test system specs.

Overclocking

Now this is where these modules really took me by surprise!  Although these are PC3200 modules, Corsair states that with slightly higher latencies, they are capable of running at PC4000 (DDR500) speed.  This was rather interesting, so I decided to see how high I can take them using a 1:1 ratio on the Soyo Dragon 2 Platinum Motherboard.  I was completely impressed with the results.  Not only was I able to run the board completely stable at 249FSB, but was able to do this while still maintaining the lower 2.5-3-3-7 latencies.  In fact, these modules actually overclocked and performed much better than both the Corsair TwinX1024-4000PRO and TwinX1024-4400 modules did on the same test board.  The TwinX1024-4000PRO, for example, was only able to achieve 475MHz with the higher default latencies of 3-4-4-8.  The results here will speak for themselves in our performance tests.  This memory is fast, highly stable and most importantly, overclock friendly! 

Performance

As will all our memory tests, we used our two preferred benchmarking suites, Sisoftware Sandra 2004 and PC Mark 2002.

Sandra 2004 Memory Bandwidth Benchmark

The extra low timings do really show on these benchmarks.  At its rated speed of 400MHz, scores were higher than any modules we have reviewed in the past.  We also see some excellent results at its maximum stable overclock of 498MHz.

PC Mark 2002

The results of our PC Mark 2002 tests were on par with Corsair's PC4000 memory modules and slightly out-performed them at maximum OC thanks to its ability to tolerate higher clock speeds with lower latencies.

In all honesty, I was certainly not expecting this type of performance from PC3200 memory.  The overall results were indeed impressive to say the least.

Next: Conclusions