Related Articles

Doom 3

PLEASE NOTE: This test is NOT fair for the 560 based system or even some 840 results, as it used the older 6600GT and older drivers. You can see where we switched cards and drivers, results with less than 159 FPS were with the 6600GT.

Ok, the Corsair PC8500 took the two top spots. By a decent margin.

Damn these are VERY decent scores!

Conclusion

OK, let's first restate the obvious.

The charts clearly show that high FSB, combined with fast overclocked CPU's and fast memory dominates.

Well, duh.

What's not obvious from the charts is that the Corsair XMS2 PC2-8500 significantly outperformed its stated specifications.

I was able to complete these tests running the memory at 2.1V, 0.1V UNDER specification.

I was able to run the memory at a PC2-9120 rating - a VERY significant increase over the PC2-8500 rating it is assigned.

In modern Intel systems, the FSB presents a significant bottleneck to using the full memory bandwidth made available by high performance DDR2 modules. We are not going to see the full potential of even PC6400 memory until the FSB hits 1333MHz, and we'd need to hit 1600MHz FSB to fully be able to utilize PC8000 memory.

Nevertheless, the performance of the XMS2-8500 modules was excellent, it overclocks superbly, and I can't wait to try them on AMD's upcoming AM2 processors with integrated DDR2 controller.