News: Anandtech i875 & i865 Memory Compatibilty Article

Omega65

Anandtech: 865PE & 875P Memory Guide

It's not often that we cover seventeen motherboards for just one memory article, but ever since motherboards based on Intel's 800MHz FSB series of chipsets were released at the end of April/beginning of May we felt the need to educate our readers on the severe memory-related issues that have plauged these motherboards.

You'll remember from our 865 Chipset article we encountered a number of compatibility issues with DDR400 SDRAM and the 865PE chipset. It turns out that we weren't the only ones; users all over the web were reporting problems. As a result we felt it was necessary to get to the bottom of these issues, and so took it upon ourselves to test five of the most popular DDR400 memory modules and nearly all the 865PE/875P motherboards we had access to.

The Candidates

For this review we compared five pairs of modules: Corsair LL (Low Latency) TwinX DDR400, Crucial DDR400, OCZ EL DDR400, TwinMOS DDR400, and Kingston HyperX DDR433 (running at 400MHz DDR).

MotherboardsTested:

*ABIT IC7 (875P) – BIOS 13 *ABIT IC7-G (875P) BIOS 13 *ABIT IS7 (865PE) BIOS 13 beta 3 *ABIT IS7-G (865PE) BIOS 13 beta 3 *Albatron PX865PE Pro (865PE) – BIOS 4/17/03 (first release) *Albatron PX865PE Pro II (865PE) – BIOS 4/17/03 (first release) *AOpen AX4C Max (875P) – BIOS 1.04a *ASUS P4C800 Deluxe (875P) - BIOS 1006 *ASUS P4P800 Deluxe (865PE) - BIOS 1007 *DFI PRO875 LAN Party (875P) – BIOS 5/16/03 *Epox 4PCA3+ (875P) – BIOS 06/06/2003 *Epox 4PDA2+ (865PE) – BIOS 05/09/03 *Gigabyte 8KNXP (875P) – BIOS M4 *Gigabyte 8KNXP Ultra (875P) – BIOS F2c *Gigabyte 8PENXP (865PE) - BIOS M2 *MSI 875P Neo-FIS2R (875P) BIOS 1.4 *MSI 865PE Neo2-FIS2R (865PE) – BIOS 1.2

excerpt

While Corsair LL modules are certainly the best modules you can pair with an 865PE or 875P motherboard they are significantly more expensive than most other modules. Kingston HyperX or OCZ EL PC3200 modules are other excellent alternatives. However when it comes right down to it you can't beat Crucial in value. Since the difference between all five memory modules was very slim to begin with (the largest variance was 3% in one instance), Crucial's price advantage over Corsair is significant. In fact, buying two PC3200 Crucial modules is about 30% cheaper than buying two PC3200 Corsair LL modules (be it LL/TwinX or vanilla CAS2.0 modules).