PC2-8500 Memory Roundup

Mike D. 19 Mar, 2008 at 1:00am ET Article published in Tech

PC2-8500 Memory Roundup!

Although 800MHz, DDR2-6400 modules have become incredibly cheap, there is a growing number of consumers who want to take advantage of native 1066MHz DDR2 support offered by the latest Intel and AMD platforms. In the past, overclocking the system bus was necessary to acheive this frequency–not any more. This makes PC2-8500 a more viable and attractive choice for every day consumers.

The idea for this roundup actually spawned by the smile on my face from the mere $80 I paid for a Crucial Ballistix PC2-8500 kit a few months ago. I decided to start looking to manufacturers to find affordable PC2-8500 kits. Kingston, Corsair and OCZ provided us with a few kits to put to the test. Ten gigabytes in total will be put through their paces in the Icrontic lab.

Comments

19 Mar 2008 ~ 1:51pm BuddyJ Another win! Excellent review Mike!
20 Mar 2008 ~ 2:06am Winfrey heh, "golden fedora"! Icrontic has the best rating system ever

Great job Mike! Excellent read!
20 Mar 2008 ~ 7:31am Zuntar Nicely done mike, as usual!!!
20 Mar 2008 ~ 9:20pm Qeldroma A lot of what I want in a memory review with memory I look at when I shop. I'm even looking at about the same flavor of mobo ... and a quadly to boot! This is a decent test case for me and probably the enthuiast mainstream. I'm eyeing power as well as performance- so that's definitely a bene.

I was kind of surprised at the Crucials and wondered if there might be a correlation to the power draw ... or even the poor thermal contact. Regardless, they look like great sticks.

Looked like a fun bunch to play with. gj
21 Mar 2008 ~ 3:01pm TheLostSwede Excellent review Mike. I like your style. A lot.
21 Mar 2008 ~ 5:14pm lemonlime Thanks for the comments, all! Had a great time putting it together
22 Mar 2008 ~ 12:19pm mmonnin Mike, my Ballistix also has the same problem with 1 side of the heatspreader not making full contact.
22 Mar 2008 ~ 4:32pm mas0n I have 2 of these same Ballistix kits and the spreaders make full contact on both sides.