News Drop us an idea, win 6GB of DDR3 memory!

Keep all the hardcore talk about timings vs speed to separate articles that you run - that's deep geek, and largely uninteresting to a lot of people. Overclockers (to whom it'd make a difference) would read up on the module on the manufacturer site and get timings from there anyway. Plus, let's face it, they (we) probably read [H] or some similar site as well...

 

Stack it all up and play Jenga with it. You can then rate each type of memory based on how well it stacks, difficulty to remove from the stack, and the odds of the stack collapsing once the RAM is removed!

 

This.

 

Yes, thank you. I haven't slept yet. And it's 1pm. Pants.

 

Yup.

I bought the Corsair PC-3500LL kit for my Opteron back in the day (seems like forever ago now...) because every single review I'd read said that they overclocked quite happily to 260-280FSB if you slackened the timings off. Well, my kit wouldn't, no matter what. It didn't matter whether I ran it at 2-3-2-6 (the stock timings) at it's rated speed, 2-2-2-5 at it's rated speed, or 3-4-4-8 at it's rated speed - the RAM was quite happy as long as I never took it past 218FSB. Even at 3-4-4-8 and an extra 0.1v over what Corsair said... I couldn't get it memtest stable at even as low as 240FSB.

Yeah... I, too, would like to know how hot some of these kits run. When some RAM is basically the same price (within, say, £10-20) for the same specs, but one has a tiny heatspreader on it and one has something like the Corsair Dominator heatspreaders... does one run significantly cooler than the other? Because I've always been of the opinion that most of these big bulky spreaders are more of a gimmick than anything else.

 

Go german on all our asses, I'd honestly love to see "Zees memory ess slightly schneller as eet has zee slightly more advanced micronchips, they have a slightly better heatspreader auch owing due to besser materiels with a slighly more fins."

You get the idea; basically really picky about little components and give detailed explanations of all the imporvements over other brands. No offense to any Germans here it's an old Top Gear reference.

Memory, while fairly generic is a pretty core component and probably one of the most complicated to understand IMO. That said I buy ram on looks and price still provided is has a good frequency and latency.

I'd also like to see how much memory temps matter: i.e "do cooler temps give you better overclocks?", "how much heat is pumped into the case by memory?", "do they really need heatspreaders?" e.g my GEIL RAM is rated at 2.2V-2.4V but it's naked with no heat spreader whatsoever (but it looks geil with the black PCB and makes me feel geil, little joke for you Germans there, should make up for before ) so perhaps a few standalone articles on those would be cool.

 

You need to display the advantages of the new Ram you are testing and compare it to Ram in different systems ie

Core2Quad Q9650 @ 3.0Ghz Ram @ 1066Mhz 5-5-5-15 2T = (results of Ram tests)
Core i7 920 @ 3.0Ghz Ram @ 2000Mhz 8-8-8-24 2T = (results of Ram tests)
Phenom II 950 @ 3.0Ghz Ram @ 1333Mhz 4-4-4-12 2T = (results of Ram tests)
Core2Quad Q6600 @ 2.6Ghz Ram @ 800Mhz 5-5-5-15 2T = (results of Ram tests)

We need to be able to compare builds as well as Ram only for comparison and to help us decide on upgrades.

The overclockability of the Ram is also most important. Also Temperatures would also help.

Aslo a generic comparison rather than all the different latencys read speeds and write speeds.

 

Cross-Platform comparisons

With DDR3 having higher latencies but faster clock speeds than DDR2, it would be nice to see comparitive reviews, so those looking to upgrade could see if its really worth it.

The same would also be useful comparing the same DIMMs in a 2-channel vs 3-channel memory arrangement.

What I'd value from Bit-Tech as reviewers is that you guys handle dozens of kits of memory from a variety of suppliers every year, and so getting feedback on your overall impressions, build quality, packaging etc that you cant really get from a commercial website.

Perhaps review more in the way of SODIMMs too, with growing small form factor and laptop/netbook markets, information on memory upgrades and purchases of this nature would be useful too, even if the actual reviews themselves are short.

And while this may be shooting myself in the foot should I wish to win the competition prize... I also think the temperature idea mentioned by marlowdrummer would be handy. I like to have a fast gaming PC, but I'd also rather not need my fans spinning up like a tornado if im just browsing the internet and reading bit-tech (shameless plug).

 

Now you'll have them fighting over who's who! My money's on:

Lizard for Clarkson
Clive Webster for Hammond
Joe Martin for May

"THIS, is the OCZ Black DDR3 i7 kit. It's designed by a mix of madmen, Einstein clones and sweatshop workers, hand-crafted in factories in places we've never heard of. It'll do 0-1600 in CAS 8, and 0-2000 in just 10-9-9..."

Yes, we want Top Gear!

 

I want to see a comparison of the extreme kits against normal, generic, budget off-the shelf memory you get in any pre-built system. Test them in as wide a range of applications so we can see any real advantage of the superior speed, timings, voltage, heat dissipation...

But, also, I want to see high-res images of the memory and heatspreaders... e-porn Cheesecake!

 

This.

But who's Top Gear Dog and not to mention The Stig.

 

Rogan for Top Gear Dog, I reckon. As for Stig? Hmm... OK, whoever's got the best car out of the rest of the CPC/Bit staff gets Stig role. All cars put up in a poll, we choose.

 

RAM need only a simple/short performance test (ie. 1 game, 1 memory heavy app, 1 synthetic benchmark). More is just more confusing (even if it's thorough). Might also add a small overclocking test as well (knowing you might have better sticks).

Maybe testing the sticks' cooling solution under heavy load, to see if it copes, and just measuring the surface temp after the tests you've done, just to see if heat is well dissipated.
(thermal camera is not that good because some materials have low emissivity and thus are difficult to see even though they work)

And last but not least have glamour shots of the sticks posing with female models (or the opposite : models posing with sticks, I'm not sure )

 

some kind of physical durability testing would be nice. it doesn't happen frequently but when i am troubleshooting, modules can get unplugged and plugged back in many times, repeatedly. would be interesting to see if some modules could take repeated installations better than others.

 

I like the physical durability, find out how much force memory modules from each manufacturer can with stand either with a press of some sorts or dropping them out of ever increasing window heights....

 

"Battering RAM"?

 

id like to see speed vs latency testing and how it affects real things other than games. firefox vs IE vs opera competition for least amount of memory used then start changing the speeds and see which one performs best. OCing would be nice too.

 

Best custom paint job?







I vote for boobs.

 

oh and boobs....

 

IMHO a review is meant to answer any possible questions that we might have about a certain product. Since there isn't too much difference between them, there's not much to do on the memory-testing front.

I'd like to see you describe your experiences with the support you receive from the company in question, maybe by buying a budget stick in the shop, breaking it somehow (i'm sure Harry will find a way ) and then sending it off to RMA.

One other thing that would be interesting is compatibility. Some motherboards are notoriously picky about certain brands and/or certain chips. It would be interesting if you could get some results, and it would also be a good thing to see if you could test the memory you have there on a variety of the boards you have. Over time, that could become a true life-saving repository for some of us.

Power draw could also be interesting. I don't even have the faintest clue how much power memory usually draws, so if it's about the difference between 1W and 1.3W, forget it, but the difference between 25W and 35W could actually be a buying decision.

I salute you all for even asking this quastion by the way, because you are bang on the money. Memory latency numbers are among the very very few pages on this site i always skip. I go straight to the real-world stuff, and there i always go: "meh".

I utterly applaud the guy who said Mythbusters first in this thread. There's a lot of memory myths to be cleared up, and i thouroughly enjoyed this article, and more of those is the way to go as far as in-depth testing is concerned.