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

I for one would actually also like to see some stuff on the height of RAM and their coolers when it comes to some of the CPU coolers that are likely to cover the RAM area. I myself discovered that it can sometimes be extremely tight, particularly with my Corsair Dominator and the CoolerMaster V10 cooler...

the fins on the cooler are actually resting on the Dominator's cooling fins there. God help me if i decide to put another 6GB on the board, I'm going to need to pry the cooler off first

 

Maybe you could just let the end user have a hands on experience with the RAM. After all, who ever built a house by reading books?

 

Suggestions:
How far it Overclocks
Price/performance ratio compaired to other modules
Points of interest: EG. extras, coolers etc.
A shot of the memory with the heatsink off?
Temps.?
I not sure if any of these have been already posted, but if they have great minds think alike

 

I'd like to see lots of things:
- Specifications (timings, voltages)
- Some performance benchmarks(OS loading time, RAM-CPU operations)
- Overclocking (oh, yeah!)
- Thermal analisys (off, idle, load)
- Aesthetics (heatspreaders, light...)

enough?

No! Also pricing

 

The value roundup is probably the best idea. I'm part of the group that just buys the cheapest RAM from a brand that I have heard of.

 

Huh?

The only time I think about RAM is when After Effects runs out of it.

 

What´s up, guys?

Well I´m here not for the competition alltought it will be good if I won it. I really enjoys the technical way that reviews are made here however when I was searching for my future ram modules I didn´t found anything here, so I will put the things that I was looking for:

1 º I was looking for specific 1600 MHZ modules.

2º X.M.P it worth pay for it and wich modules support?

3º CAS can I play with it? What improvements from it stock´s I can manage to obtain?

4º Heatspreader they are working or it´s just fashion?

5º What external cooler devices fit this modules (xxx airflow, or xtc cooler) stuff like that.

6º OC´s we like to see the capabilities of the modules.(I know this is difficult because of the usual things, like every chip has his own capability and the problem you at bit-tech pointed as the retailer´s send you special ram modules )

7º Finally some benchs or software that use the RAM capabilities.

Sorry for the bible but it´s what I face trough I didn´t put anything about the prices because it´s very difficult for me because of my country but it´s always good to see the avaliation of the value.

My kit is a OCZ X.M.P Intel Extreme 1600 MHZ just to mention.

 

All I want extra from your memory reviews is how many times can you throw it back and forth to each other wearing full nylon suits and with the heatspreaders off to see how long ESD takes to kill it (if it really exists that is), that would be fun

Oh yeah and fill a bucket with RAM and blow it up on video, always good.

 

Use an RTOS and actually time the performance of the memory in bytes/microsecond to perform moves, copys, and deletes. in single, dual, and triple channel. Could go even farther and say test it within page boundaries and across page boundaries. And of course for different sizes, power of 2 and not, smaller then one stick and bigger then one stick.

Though you might end up testing the memory controller like this..

This may sound like a lot of work but it could all be done with a single program and a few reboots, link it to a graphing library and it could even spit out the review page lol.

 

Here is a continuation of my idea, how about you (in the cpu reviews) give:
-The length from the cpucooler to the closest ramslot (this can be done by ripping the heatsink of the ram and measuring from the rampcb to the cpucooler)
-The height of the clearance above the ramslots to the cpucooler

And in moboreviews you give the distance from the cpusocket to the ramslot

This would make an almighty compatibility chart of mobos, cpucoolers and ram. It isn't really as hard or complicated as it sounds. It is simply a few lengthmeasurements and surely you must have some old/broken ram that you can sacrifice to get a rampcb from which to measure distance to cpucooler?

 

Extreme Testing

Id Love to see a review where the cheapest Memmory know to man does battle with the most expensive. Id love to see at least 3 El-cheapos try take on the big boys, Am I a fool for always spending the big bucks on RAM?

As far as being totaly lame, Id also like to see the Windows Experience Index (Found in Vista and Win7) rating of each component reviwed, not just the RAM.

And if you could convince the manufacturers to sell the produts you review at a slightly cheaper cost to your readers, perhaps with a kind of "I want it Now!" button on the site, that could be usefull and economical for all involved.

Cheers
Richie

 

My suggestion:

Since performance in synthetic benchmarks gives results in the fractions of seconds, and in gaming the general performance is fairly consistent across equally classed types, I think that memory reviews should move away from direct comparisons to the miliseconds and focus on the following factors:

Reliability
Cost
Design
overclock-ability
voltage tolerance
heat
motherboard compatibility
cost/performance ratio
extra features like fancy heatsinks and watercooling adapters
Availability
General performance. Load times, real-world apps, not synthetic benchmarks

 

I would really like to see how the different kits perform, in terms of thermal properties.
The bandwith and speed are now so high that I really cannot feel the difference, so som graphs comparing the different kits thermal properties would be great.
Maybe you could even stick a probe in a measure som surface temperatures on the heat spreaders, compared to the internal IC temperature(is that possible?) ?

Thankyou

 

I reckon you should time how long it takes to get them out of their packaging and stuck into a motherboard.

If you're buying performance ram, you want to check the puppies out asap and it's infuriating if the blister pack has to be opened with a pair of scissors or you have to twist the packaging for the sticks to pop out and end up with your heart in your mouth as one drops onto the carpet.

 

I think it would be a good to just do a proper testing whenever a new IC shows up, do they oc? how hot do they run? will the survive for a while? *cough* elpida hyper...

But I don't think there is much point to doing proper reviews of specific kits, simply put, especially with I7 memory speed and timings does not really matter anyway for normal use and for benching you buy ram based on a specific IC and hope to get lucky with the oc headroom.

 

You guys have a retail partner right? Get the retail version preferably, test and OC as many as possible and get some averages from that.

 

1. I would like to suggest that the testing should still continue to be as thorough, to keep the facts of the memory being reviewed as legitimate as possible. A way of keeping the honest, honest, and to prevent the marketing teams out of the results. Even though individual kits vary, there has to be a baseline made somewhere, and BIT-TECH is where I come for my hardware reviews.

2. Provide a tabled list that could separate each class, ie. DDR2 on one column, DDR3 on another column or separate table, and so forth. And a comparative column or row to show the over clocking results.
Show the top 3 - 10 in performance, the top 3 - 10 in overall performance vs. value; and show what the current BIT-TECH recommended modules are.

3. Create one table as a point of reference that shows what each recorded test provided, with a small say, 300 character or less note on each, as a master history list; on a separate page. The goal would be like a master list of memory review results.

4. Try to work with the E-salers, and Re-tailers with a way to provide a link to memory in the review table, although this wouldn't be as important. Anybody here that can't cut&paste to their favorite shopping site should not be shopping in the first place.

5. As to individual IC's, or specific IC layout, very short, or no description unless it is a new to market item. Close ups of the heat spreaders and anything different than a piece of stock ram without heat sinks are very much appreciated.

6. As to content/review flavor; quick, to the point, and any notable quirks found, is pretty sufficient. Show the breaking point of stability on an over clock.

 

Test:
- Bandwith
- Max freq
- The weight and volume of the heatspreader (by dipping it in a liquid and seeing how much the level rises)

I have no idea why anyone would care about anything else, it's a shame if your boss makes you test memories in the first place,.. I just don't see how 100 game tests with differences of 0,4 FPS or program tests with differences of ,1 seconds could be made interesting.

 

I know a lot of readers want in depth teccy reviews and thats fine but for a lot of readers, this kit is to do a specific job. For me this is graphics, I do a lot of 3D work using 3D Studio MAX, so some sort of test in specific software such as this would be fantastic.

1. Answers to questions like which is the quickest/most efficient for Mental Ray rendering of complex scenes.
2. Which is the best setup for 2D work using large Photoshop files.
3. How well does importing video into Flash to compress using Flash Video On2 encoding etc...
4. Important features about cost effectiveness (bang per buck) etc...

All of this could easily tie into other reviews about processors and other kit. Magazines do sometimes touch on these areas, but i've never seen one talk about industry standard software on a regular monthly basis used on the best kit around, standard setup or overclocked.

Graphics software is expanded constantly so what better way of testing new kit but with new software, it may also encourage software vendors to release bug fixes which may be found wanting as a result of Custom PC tesing! NICE.

 

You are already doing a cracking job on all the reviews, although I would like to see more content more often and maybe even a little something to keep us going over the weekends ;o)

OLD vs NEW
I think it might prove useful to the community as a whole to provide benchmarks that include a reference back to older memory modules in addition to the new ones. This would provide a good basis for comparison seeing DDR compared against, DDR2 & DDR3.

REAL WORLD APPLICATION TEST BOTTLENECK
How does Brand X really fare in a real world environment and when running memory intensive benchmarks does a particular brand have more of a bottleneck and how do memory controllers affect this. Does the speed of the CPU make affect the results?

PERFORMANCE COMPARISON
Show the relative performance differences between Single, Dual channel and Triple channel and how well do they scale as you increase the amount of memory from say 1GB, 2GB, 3GB, 6GB to 12GB? How does this affect Heat, Reliability and Overclocking?

HEAT SPREADERS
How does memory perform with their standard heat spreader vs no heat spreader vs custom heat spreaders? Measure Heat, Reliability and Overclocking potential. How does airflow or complete lack of, affect their performance/reliability.

GOOD OR BAD DESIGN
We've all read about motherboards and design features to look out for that help one manufacturer stand out from the crowd. Are there different designs that make one memory module rise above another, i.e. quality of IC's or is it just a cost issue?

COST vs QUALITY
Not just another bang for buck, but how do the "no-name" budget brands compare to the top tier manufacturers?