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Introduction

RAM is a hot commodity for hardcore and performance hungry users alike. Sometimes, there's confusion about whether RAM can actually give you a performance boost or not, as in the case of DDR400 performance results from tests like our KT4 Ultra and Soyo KT400 Dragon Ultra reviews, but here we found that that increasing your memory bandwidth with faster, low latency RAM can lead to measurable performance increases.

The RAM we're looking at is OCZ's PC2700 EL DDR RAM. EL is the acronym for OCZ's "Enhanced Latency" series - a series of RAM that promises CAS2 timings at PC2700 settings. This is similar to Corsair's XMS CL2 RAM (including the PC3200 and PC3600 XMS RAM that is standard in our benchmark reference systems) and other low latency performance RAM from Kingston, Crucial, and others.

Specs and basics:

The EL RAM uses ULN (Ultra Low Noise) shielded PCB technology and has OCZ brand EL 4.5 ns DDR IC's. These EL modules come with fancy copper heatspreaders on both side, and OCZ rates the RAM to take up to 2.8V with the copper heatspreader installed.

Looking at the pictures you can see that this is very aggressive and unique looking RAM. There's some debate over actual functional benefits of heatspreaders, but there's no denying that they make your RAM look amazing, especially if you have a case that shows off your components.

Performance Setup and Testing

To test the RAM we used an Intel rig with a Sis648 based motherboard. We chose this setup because the MSI 648Max that we used comes with two excellent memory clocking features:

1) the ability to lock your PCI/AGP clock at 33/66Mhz regardless of FSB and memory speeds
2) And a wealth of Memory:CPU ratios that allow the greatest flexibility in selecting various memory speeds.

The actual test system specs were:

Intel P4 2.8Ghz chip
AVC Sunflower P4 Cooler
MSI 648Max motherboard
ATI RADEON 9700 Pro128MB
Seagate 120GB ATA133 Barracuda ST3100
WinXP with SP1

Tests run:
Sisoft Sandra 2003
PCMark 2002
Sysmark 2002