Corsair and NVIDIA announce jointly developed "Enhanced Performance Profile" memory specification

Corsair and NVIDIA have announced a new open standard that will probably revolutionalize the way casual enthusiasts and beginning overclockers use their high end memory. The two companies have been jointly developing a new memory overclocking feature which they call "Enhanced Performance Profiles", or EPP.

In a nutshell, EPP are additional settings profiles stored in unused SPD space. The JEDEC specifications actually only require a very small amount of data to be stored in the SPD, which leaves a lot of room for additional information. Corsair and NVIDIA took advantage of this space to do something that is actually quite ingenious: they decided to use it to store tweaked memory settings which encompass parameters far exceeding what JEDEC covers but which advanced overclockers tweak on a regular basis. The EPP profiles include settings for such things as memory voltage, drive strength, tRCD, tRP, tRAS, and many other settings that you probably never touch at all.

The purpose of EPP is to simplify memory tweaking for the casual or beginning enthusiast, and even serve as a starting point from which more advanced overclockers can fine tune their settings.

Two Types of EPP Profiles

The EPP specification, which will be an open spec that Corsair and NVIDIA encourage other manufacturers to adopt, allows for 2 different types of profiles. Up to 2 Full Profiles or 4 Abbreviated profiles will fit into the SPD. For all intents and purposes the Abbreviated Profiles are actually quite extensive and go beyond what most people will bother to even touch, while Full Profiles cover a vast majority of parameters that are tweakable.

During a recent presentation we already saw that some diagnostic programs are able to read the EPP, and we expect most programs like Sisoft and CPUID/CPU-Z to be able to do as well. Even for those who have no interest in using the EPP profiles and prefer to manually set their memory settings, the EPP will be a huge boon since they are essentially workable settings stored on the RAM.

As for motherboard support, there's a good reason NVIDIA helped to develop this feature: they intend on it being a highlight of their upcoming chipsets and although we expect other chipsets to follow suit NVIDIA should have a healthy lead as the dominant supplier supporting EPP.

At this time Corsair have announced 2 memory modules which sport EPP, and their TWIN2X2048-6400C4 and the TWIN2X2048-8500C5. These two gigabyte module pairs, running at 800MHz and 1066MHz respectively, will be just the first of many to come: Corsair has announced that all their new XMS DDR2 modules starting today will support EPP.