After careful consideration I have decided to transfer all hardware review activities to a new domain. I purchased Hardwareasylum.com in 2012 and have been working hard to build a new and improved Ninjalane on that domain. If you are reading this you have reached one of the archived articles, news, projects and/or reviews that were left behind during the site migration.
Please update your bookmarks and be sure to visit the new and improved Ninjalane at Hardwareasylum.com
Corsair Twin2X DDR2 5400C4 ProSeries Review
Author: Dennis Garcia
Published: Thursday, October 21, 2004
Memory Info
From a performance standpoint it appears that DDR2 doesn't offer any real benefit over DDR1 since current hardware cannot provide enough bandwidth to fully utilize what DDR2 has to offer. Though it will not be long until memory is once again the bottleneck. Below are a few features that separate DDR1 from DDR2 with the suggested benefits in bold
DDR1
Package: TSOP(66 pins)
Voltage: 2.5V/2.5V I/O
Densities: 128Mb-1Gb
Internal Banks: 4
Prefetch: 2
Speed: 200,266,333,400 Mhz
Read Latency: 2, 2.5, 3 CLK
Write Latency: 1 CLK
Modules: 128-pin DIMM, 200-pin SODIMM, 172-pin MicroDIMM
Voltage: 2.5V/2.5V I/O
Densities: 128Mb-1Gb
Internal Banks: 4
Prefetch: 2
Speed: 200,266,333,400 Mhz
Read Latency: 2, 2.5, 3 CLK
Write Latency: 1 CLK
Modules: 128-pin DIMM, 200-pin SODIMM, 172-pin MicroDIMM
DDR2
Package: FBGA (Fine-pitch Ball Grid Array) only
- (Enables better electrical performance and speed)
Voltage: 1.8V/1.8V I/O
- (Reduces memory system power demand)
Densities: 256Mb-2Gb
- (High-density components enable large memory subsystems)
Internal Banks: 4 and 8
- (1Gb and higher DDR2 devices will have 8 banks for better performance)
Prefetch: 4
- (Provides reduced core speed dependency for better yields)
Speed: 400, 533, 667 Mhz
- (With a migration to higher bus speed)
Read Latency: 3, 4, 5 CLK
- (Eliminating one-half clock settings helps speed internal DRAM logic and improves yields)
Write Latency: Read Latency - 1
- (Improves command bus efficiency)
Modules: 240-pin DIMM, 200-pin SODIMM, 214-pin MicroDIMM
- (Improved layout and power delivery design)
- (Enables better electrical performance and speed)
Voltage: 1.8V/1.8V I/O
- (Reduces memory system power demand)
Densities: 256Mb-2Gb
- (High-density components enable large memory subsystems)
Internal Banks: 4 and 8
- (1Gb and higher DDR2 devices will have 8 banks for better performance)
Prefetch: 4
- (Provides reduced core speed dependency for better yields)
Speed: 400, 533, 667 Mhz
- (With a migration to higher bus speed)
Read Latency: 3, 4, 5 CLK
- (Eliminating one-half clock settings helps speed internal DRAM logic and improves yields)
Write Latency: Read Latency - 1
- (Improves command bus efficiency)
Modules: 240-pin DIMM, 200-pin SODIMM, 214-pin MicroDIMM
- (Improved layout and power delivery design)
Quickly stated DDR2 has the ability to be quite a bit faster than DDR1 though given the default timings and clock speed of 400Mhz a comparable PC3200 module will perform about the same on similar hardware.