Corsair has captured the fancy of the high
performance enthusiasts market with the introduction of their XMS (Extreme
Memory Speed) line of memory modules. Today we focus the XMS 3200 C2 series.
The C2 designation indicates that this specific model is rated for CAS 2
performance at memory bus speeds of 400.
Column Address Strobe or CAS refers to the
measure of time (in nanoseconds) required for data transfer to occur after the
memory's chipset controller issues a read command. It stands to reason that a
lower CAS rating will produce better overall system performance due to the
reduction in time related to data transfer. However, the actual performance
gain is not directly proportional to the decrease in CAS rating. The relative
level of performance varies between motherboard manufacturers, and indeed from
board to board due to the fact that trace delays are not consistent
throughout.
With DDR memory, its bus speed is a value equal to 2 X FSB speed. The XMS 3200
module is rated to perform at FSB speeds of 200 MHZ. The 3200 designation is
derived by multiplying the memory's bus speed rating (in this case 400) by the
module's DIMM width (8 bytes).
Testing Methodology
We used Sisoft Sandra as the benchmark tool for measuring the XMS 3200's
performance relative to other memory modules. The contenders are:
• Crucial 2100
• Corsair XMS 2700
• Corsair XMS 3000
Note: All the modules used are 256 MB and are rated to perform at CAS 2
settings.
Due to the high quality of the memory modules used in the tests, we decided to
tweak the memory settings in the Albatron motherboard's bios to the following:
• CAS 2
• Active to Precharge Delay 6
• RAS to CAS Delay 2
• RAS Precharge 2
Note: The above mentioned settings were kept
constant for all tests conducted.
The first portion of the test involved capturing
the Ram Int Buffered (RIB) scores at default CPU settings for each module. For
the second part of the test, we measured the RIB scores for each module after
achieving the maximum respective CPU overclock for each.
The test bed consisted of the following:
Motherboard Albatron PEV Pro
Processor Intel 2.4G P4 (Using stock cooling)
HDD Western Digital 300BB
OS Windows 2000 Professional (SP2)
Video Card Generic Geforce 2
PCI Cards None
Floppy/Optical Drives None
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