Test Rig

What better way to test theses modules than on a recommended mother-board that supports excellent overclocking and being one of the fastest motherboards on the market doesn't hurt either. Let's have a look:

• Thermaltake Armor Tower Case
• Thermaltake 480 TWV PSU
• LANPARTY nF4 SLI-DR
• AMD Athlon 64 3500+ Winchester Core
• NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra
• Mushkin HP3200 Redline
• 120GB Maxtor SATA HDD

I cleared the CMOS and stuffed the REDLINE modules in our DFI LANPARTY nF4 SLI-DR mother-board and she fired up first time go, running the standard advertised clock rating. The modules look excellent in our test bed and now we can check out some peformance...

On the DFI nF4 SLI-DR the Mushkin REDLINE memory modules are very visible due to the contrast with the orange/yellow memory expansion slots. This leads as well to a very colorfull palet inside your computer case.

Our configuration was perfect to help cool the ram, the CPU cooler effectively acted as an active cooler for the ram modules, while the CPU heat is significant, the fact we are moving a good amount of airflow over the modules allows for cooler operation.

I highly recommend adding a fan cooler over these modules when running at 3.5 volts, these modules tend to get very hot at this level and could cause instability problems if you do not utilize a cooling system over these modules.

CPU-Z 1.28

Here are some CPU-Z shots to give you the skinny on the system from an application's point of view. Just click the pictures above to get the stock readings that we started with.

RightMark Memory Analyzer v3.5

This memory analyzer is a good test API and provides a wealth of information about the hardware we are testing. I will run bench marks from this API accordingly and see what we come up with.

On the CPU section of RightMark Memory Analyzer we get all details about the CPU used on the system with the core speed and bus speed. The bus speed will be the same as the memory speed for the memory used within our configuration for this test.

When we move to the Memory section more details are given on the memory modules itself. These numbers are what we got with default settings and we plan on running the RightMark test using stock settings as base for our analysis. When we jump the SPD (Serial Presence Detect) tab we get addition information on the actual settings of the memory timings and refresh and you can see the stats above.

Synthetic Results Average

• Real Read Bandwidth, MB/s 4331.24
• Real Write Bandwidth, MB/s 2349.34
• Real RAM Bandwidth, MB/s 2925.08

Here we can see some pretty impressive stock timings that are well above average for this platform. The Read Latency at 34.30 nanoseconds is really fast for out of the box default settings.

All Mushkin High Performance memory modules come with an installed heat spreader to eliminate localized hotspots, further enhancing lifetime and overclockability. Mushkin modules are tested and carry a limited lifetime warranty upon product registration.