Model:  CMX512-3500C2

Manufacturer:  Corsair

Reviewed By:  hmale

Review Date:  01/29/03

    PC enthusiasts; or should I say PC extremists, are always searching for new ways of pushing their systems to new heights. The newest motherboard, the fastest CPU, and the most exotic cooling techniques are all in the arsenal of the user willing to claim the bragging rights associated with having the best. And the best is what ExtremeMhz will be discussing today…the best memory that is.  As we all know, even when employing the aforementioned strategies, unless premium quality memory is used, maximum performance will remain elusive. 

A while back we compared the performance of multiple flavors of the Corsair XMS series memory modules, and their performance relative to our reference Crucial brand memory.  As expected, the Crucial memory performed admirably, but it could not keep up with the Corsair modules when subjected to the most stressful of conditions.  The winner of the competition came as no surprise; the Corsair XMS3200 led the pack and maintained a commanding lead over Crucial and its XMS siblings.  Today, ExtremeMhz will throw the XMS series 3500 into the mix to see what new levels of performance can be achieved.

The specific module we will be testing is the CMX512-3500C2

Features

The specs directly from Corsair:

Among the features listed, latency ratings are the most relevant with respect to performance.  Of these, CAS is the most important.  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 3500 module is rated to perform at FSB speeds of 217 MHZ. The 3500 designation is derived by multiplying the memory's bus speed rating (in this case 434) by the module's DIMM width (8 bytes).

Testing

The test configuration we used is as follows:

The testing methodology:

We used Sisoft Sandra 2003 as the benchmark tool for measuring the XMS 3500's performance relative to other memory modules. The contenders are:

• Crucial 2100

• Corsair XMS2700

• Corsair XMS3000

• Corsair XMS3200

Note 1: All the modules used are rated to perform at CAS 2 settings.

Note 2: All the modules used are 256MB.  The XMS3500 is 512MB.

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 3:  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.

Next: Results & Conclusion