PQI TURBOmemory™ PQI24200-1GB-BD DDR2 Dual Channel Kit

PQI is a newcomer to the hardware scene. Having been established in 1998, PQI designs and manufactures memory storage devices from DDR SDRAM to Flash storage memory solutions. Since then PQI is a new force to recon with.

PQI24200-1GB DB comes with elegant quality Mirrored Black Copper heat spreader to enable efficient heat dissipation. All PQI TURBOmemory™ DDR2 modules have been rigorously tested to perform superbly at its rated speed and come with lifetime warranty. Let's take a look at this very interesting product in detail.

The Modules:

Right off the bat we noticed the heat spreaders. What set's these spreaders aside from others, is the fact these are made from black copper plate and the finish is that of black mirror adorned by a stainless center piece and raised laser etched monogram logo. This design is very elegant and classy.

The front and backside's are the same black metal mirror finish and while these are awesome looking, the finger prints stand out like a soar thumb. So cleaning will be manditory after installation. The heat spreaders are thick and feel solid to the touch.

This ram runs at DDR2-533MHz rating at the newest standard times of 3-3-3-8 @ +1.8v on a 200MHz FSB. This DDR2 is fast and our results show it shines best when over-clocked. The ram installed on our 240-pin system with average force and do care should be used when installing these modules on raised motherboards left in there trays.

At any angle the ram looks superb and will appeal to the elite who desire the classy modern black mirror look. Below we took a stand up shot to give you an idea of the reflection this ram gives. The black copper finish is state of the art.

There are all kinds of configurations and voltage settings that will effect over all performance. In our test we left the voltages at stock settings.

Techincal Feedback:

Part Number: PQI24200-1GDB
Quality Control: Rigorously tested in pair at dual channel environment
Package: 1GB kit (2x512MB)
Organization: Two 64M x 64-bit
CAS Latency: 3-3-3-8
Test Voltage: 2.0 V
Heat Spreader: Mirrored Black Copper
Speed: DDR2 533MHz (PC2-4200)
Type: 240-pin DDR SDRAM
Error Checking: Non-ECC
Registered/Unbuffered: Unbuffered
Warranty: Lifetime

Installation Test Bed:

We set the system at default using a 200MHz FSB on this 925X intel chipset DFI motherboard, and proceeded with our bandwidth marks compiled by Sandra Professional 2004. Stock voltage, stock Prescott copper core HSF, default BIOS settings. The motherboard used is the DFI LANParty 925X T-2. This motherboard romps the cpu upwards of 600MHz over stock 3.4GHz frequencies.

The modules look great and fit like a charm. These are in dual channel mode and had to be set manually to 3-3-3-8. While these modules run at 3-3-3-8 it appears if the core logic defaults our system to 4-4-4-12. We manually set the timings to 3-3-3-8 in our system BIOS, rebooted and sure enough the ram runs at 3-3-3-8. Phewwww!

Anything over 220MHz FSB and the ram would have to be set back to 4-4-4-12 on our test rig. each time we added FSB to the system the ram would set at 4-4-4-12 up to 230MHz FSB.

We achieved a maxium over-clock of 3.961GHz using this ram, which about the same head space on our corsair 675MHz DDR2. This is a sign that thermal heat is causing a bottleneck in our over-clock-ability. So this Prescott is going to be limited by the cooling solution used and this will change as we plan to watercool this rig and will push the 4gig envelope.

This rig is using a Antec NEO Power 480watt Modular supplying +12v rails to our NV45, Pioneer DVR108 DVDR and two Maxtor Diamond Max 9 120GB HDD's.s, 2 x 120mm UV LED Fans, 3 80mm UV Fans provided by A.C. Ryan. Onboard sound was enabled and running the Azalia High Definition Audio driver in 7.1 configuration. 32 Processes was loaded and enabled.