DDR2's reputation has always been plagued by high latencies in exchange for high bandwidth. When DDR2 was first announced, the latencies were rated 4-4-4-12 at speeds of 266MHz. That is just terrible. Fortunately, memory companies were able to find good ICs that are capable of doing extreme low latencies of 3-2-2. Currently the only memory IC that is capable of extreme low latencies would be the Micron fatbody, "fatty", D9s. There have been talks that Micron discontinued the die revision but memory companies are still capable of finding these great ICs. It is all the better for us right?
Patriot is no longer a common name in the enthusiast crowd. Their reputation of having high quality enthusiast memory spread as fast as a nasty rash, which in this case, is a very good thing. Their XBL line of memory targets overclockers and hardware enthusiasts. For a long time I have wondered what it stood for and now I know. XBL stands for eXtreme Bandwidth and Latency. Currently Patriot has two DDR models that fall under the XBL series--the PC3200 and the PC4800. Intel fans need not fret when it comes to DDR2 memory. Patriot has also released an XBL series for low latency DDR2 memory. The memory is exactly what is in store for us today, the PC2-5600.
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Review:
Insanetek
Sep 29, 2005, 07:59 AM
