As most people know, SLI and Crossfire are technologies developed by NVIDIA and ATi respectively to allow the installation of multi-graphic cards in a single system. We have seen a number of SLI/Crossfire ready VGA cards, motherboards and power supply units. It was only recently though that the SLI/Crossfire certification appeared on RAM modules. Even a few months ago, we could not imagine the day which SLI and Crossfire would cross swords on a RAM review could come. The OCZ PC2-6400 Crossfire certified edition 2GB dual channel kit is tested with the Crucial Ballistix PC2-6400 SLI-Ready 2GB kit.

But what does Crossfire Certification and SLI-Ready mean for RAM modules?

SLI-Ready RAM modules have EPP (enhanced performance profiles) programmed in their SPD settings. When the BIOS of a motherboard can make use of the EPP profiles and detects them, the RAM modules run at more aggressive timings by default. Only motherboards with the NVIDIA 590 nForce chipset offer this feature for now, but more may be released in the future. The performance boost is rather small (close to non-existent if you tweak the timings in the BIOS manually) and of course it doesn’t mean that SLI-Ready RAM cannot work on non-SLI ready motherboards. The RAM modules will work on any motherboard without problems, but the normal SPD will be used.

Crossfire Certified modules do not really have any special features, only ATi’s logo and approval. The only thing that they really offer is ensured compatibility with the rest of ATi certified hardware (i.e. motherboards). Again, that does not mean that the Crossfire Certified modules won’t work on any other motherboard, just that they are ensured to work on ATi certified motherboards.