Test Environment

The MVKTech test rig we are using for this review is none other than our DFI LANParty SLI-DR, Thermaltake Armor sponsored AMD platform guinea pig. Hehe, the system will use the following hardware provided by the manufacturers for all our reviews at MVKTech.

• AMD Athlon 64 3500+ Winchester
• DFI LANParty nF4 SLI-DR
• 1x HIS X800 GTO IceQ II Turbo
• 1x 120GB Maxtor SATA HDD
• ATI Catalyst 5.9
• 1x LG 16X DVDRW Multi-format
• 2048MB OCZ EB DDR PC-4000 PE Dual Channel
• Swiftech TEC Water Cooling Kit
• Thermaltake 480 watt TWV
• Thermaltake Armor Case (Courtesy of Xoxide)

This test bed has receives a lot of use and is our primary testing platform at MVKTech. When we test VPU/GPU's, we use rigs that are in production and used daily, so you get a better idea of performance under a typical configured home used computer, we leave all our processes running and do not super tweak the platform to yield scores that might only happen with this test bed. So to keep things into perspective we would rather give real world results.

Now that we showed the the rig and hardware test bed, we will go into the system BIOS and show you our DRAM configuration. This is our system default settings and this is what we will test at. After installing the OCZ EB DDR PC-4000 2x1024MB Platinum Edition into our rig, I opened the BIOS took this screenie then re-saved BIOS and let it boot to windows to get some CPU-Z feedback.

CPU-Z 1.30

Like always we will fire up the general purpose freeware applications we enjoy using and CPU-Z is one of them. First off this is how we configured the system. We started out with a completely default system running at a HTT of 200MHz. Totally default voltage, with memory timing's set to automatic in the system BIOS. Let's pull some stat's and see what we got...

As seen in the pictures we stuffed the ram in slots 3 & 4 and we loaded up good ole CPU-Z to report on the system configuration. With a click of the drop box I set the memory slot selection to Slot #3 and took this screenie.

What we see above is our 1024MB in Slot #3 with a maximum bandwidth of 250MHz (500MHz effective) with a table frequency of 250MHz, this is what is called programmable performance tables and OCZ programs there's to run at 3-3-2-8 @ 250MHz, that is some very aggressive timings.

The memory is reported as having a timing of 3-2-7-7 under our nF4 SLI-DR AMD motherboard with the BIOS memory configuration set to "Auto". This means the system determines the correct timings based the programmable table built into each module, allowing the system to adjust for optimum performance. Now that we know what kind of configuration we are running lets do a default test and see what we get...