Anandtech Reviews Mushkin RAM

EisleyRocks writes "Trying to find the right RAM to satisfy your overclocking needs? Anandtech has reviewed the latest offering from Mushkin. From the article: 'For gamers who seek fast timings and high bandwidth at stock memory ratios, the Mushkin XP2-5300 is a very good choice. The same can be said for overclockers looking for the highest DDR2 clock speeds that they can find. There are a few memories that can go higher in speed than Mushkin DDR2, but there are very few current DDR2 modules that can do 3-3-3 timings to DDR2-700 and above, or DDR2 memories that can handle higher voltage as well as this Mushkin. For now, the Mushkin XP2-5300 is a good choice among DDR2 1GB modules in 2GB kits.'"

Re:Mushkin

[RupW]

So, do they actually manufacture RAM, or just retail it?

Judging by the article, they take Elpida's RAM chips and put them on their own custom "Brain Power" PCBs.

I don't see how much difference the PCB can make though: it's just an electrical connection to the chips, right? Sure, you can keep the circuits short and use really high purity copper but that's about it isn't it?

Re:ECC?

[miller701]

I don't know about ECC (or even just parity) support in current desktop chipsets, but shouldn't overclockers who are worried about reliability (and all of them should be) start using ECC memory so that they are at least likely to notice when they are going too far?

As I remember it, ECC is signifcantly slower than non-parity. Parity RAM is pretty much non existant, and has been for quite some time.

From my perspective, most overclockers seem to be only worried about going from 80 fps to 83 fps in their First Person Shooters, I don't think they really care that much about stability.