Last month, Kingston Technology announced the release of a high-performance, low-latency 800MHz DDR2 fully-buffered dual-inline memory modules (FB-DIMMs). This memory kit should look familiar to our readers as we showed you the prototype heat sink last year at the Intel Developer Forum. These modules were built to run on the Intel 5400 chipset, which is the chipset used on the Intel Skulltrail platform. We first spotted the super fast Intel Skulltrail platform at IDF last year and finally got one to benchmark on our test bench in February of this year. The performance numbers of the system were stellar, but it did and still does have a weakness and that would be the memory picked for the system. Intel went with FB-DIMMs on the D5400XS workstation motherboard and while the board was one of the first to support quad channel memory the press kits were sent out with dual channel memory kits. This actually impacted performance, but at the time 800MHz FB-DIMM memory kits were still in development and very expensive. If that wasn't bad enough, FB-DIMM memory kits run very hot since they have a controller IC on each module. Early adopters of the platform didn't have too many memory choices when it came to this expensive enthusiast platform, but where there is demand, a product will arise.
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Review: Legit-Reviews
Jun 13, 2008, 04:46 PM
