Test
Systems
AMD Athlon64 FX-62 (2.8Ghz)
Abit AN9 Fatailty
MSI K9N SLI Platinum
2x1Gb DDR2-800 (4-4-4-12) (Corsair)
2x1Gb DDR2-800 (4-4-4-12) (GeIL)
Geforce 7950GX2 1Gb
74Gb WD Raptor
Enermax 600w Noisetaker CPU
Sony 710A DVD writer
80Gb Samsung Sata Drive
Coolermaster Nautilus Cooler
Windows XP Pro +SP2
NF5 reference drivers (WHQL)
Forceware 91.31
PCmark 2005
Sisoft Sandra 2007
Sonic MyDVD v6.1
FEAR
Photoshop CS2
ATI Avivo Converter
Windows Media Player 10
The test system was built from scratch, a format
of the hard drive was performed (NTFS) and then
Windows XP was installed. Following the completion
of the installation, the Nvidia drivers were installed.
The only updates applied were SP2 and .NET Framework
1.1(latest service pack) and the latest Media
Player version and Patches. Next, the latest builds
of the benchmarking tools were installed and finally,
the hard drive was de-fragmented. For each test,
the Nvidia drivers were set to default quality/optimizations
(unless otherwise stated).
Good
Benchmarking Practice:
Where
possible, each benchmark was performed 3 times
and the median result for each resolution/setting
is shown in the tables that will follow. All applications
had their latest patches applied.
Additional
Setup Notes:
As the Corsair and GeIL
modules we are testing today vary in some timings
we have chosen to run the Corsair sticks at Stock
settings and comparable settings. By settings
we are only referring to the major items that
end users would normally change and those are:
CAS# - RAS# to CAS# - RAS#
Precharge – Tras –Trc and Command
Rate.
There
are other minor timing differences between the
modules however it would not be normal for end
users to change those and therefore we have left
as is.
To
summarise, the Corsair stock settings are: 4-4-4-12
– 2T with Trc of 22
The
GeIL stock settings are: 4-4-4-12 – 2T with
Trx of 17
Finally,
motherboard testing was performed using the Corsair
sticks with default settings.
