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Benchmark Setup

The Corsair XMS4000 was tested on the following hardware configuration:

• AMD Athlon 3700+ Socket 939 processor
• DFI LanParty nF4 SLI-DR motherboard
• Western Digital WD1200JD 120 GB Serial ATA hard drive
• NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT 256 MB PCI-Express
• Fortron Blue Storm 500W power supply

The contenders were as follows:

• Corsair XMS4000 PC4000 memory
• 2*512 MB OCZ PC3500 Gold Edition GX
• 2*512 MB OCZ PC4000 Gold Edition VX
• 2*512 MB OCZ PC4200 EL Platinum Edition
• 2*512 MB OCZ PC4800 Platinum Edition

We used a combination of SiSoft Sandra and RightMark Memory Analyzer 3.45 to test the RAM, adding WinRAR and Doom3 to show some of the impacts of memory timings on real applications, as well as MemTest86+ 1.5 to test for errors when overclocking. For comparison, we've thrown in results from previous RAM reviews.

Benchmarks

We used four different programs to test the influence of the memory bandwidth on different programs.

• WinRAR
• Sandra 2004
• RightMark
• Doom3

We should note that the previous memory benchmarks were run with a Winchester core Athlon 64, which is slightly faster for latencies than the newer San Diego core we are using - however the San Diego can reach faster memory speeds, offsetting the slight latency advantage enjoyed by the Winchester core.

WinRAR

I like using WinRAR because it is significantly affected not only by processor speed, but also by memory bandwidth and latency.

The Corsair XMS4000 did quite well, but it was beaten out by those memory sticks that were able to run at a 300MHz (DDR600) data rate. The highest that the Corsair could reach was 285MHz (DDR570) - which is actually quite impressive given that it is only rated for DDR 500!

In WinRAR, the DDR 570 timings were 18.6% faster than the DDR 500 timings, mind you the processor was also being run 39.3% faster (shhhhh! yes, we got the San Diego to run at 3.025GHz, but unfortunately it was not 100% stable at that speed)