DDR2, as the name suggests, is the successor to DDR- pretty much the most widely used memory nowadays. As being reported by a lot of articles, DDR2 doesn’t provide us with much of a performance jump at this time, however, over the next few years, we will see it implemented and utilized properly. Quite a few of the memory manufacturers are already shipping their DDR2 modules as Intel has built support for it in their 915/925 chipset. We should also see AMD chipset manufactures offer DDR2 support in the near future as that’s just a natural progression of technology.

With us today, we have DDR2 memory modules by four manufacturers and we’re gonna be looking at the performance differences between these modules as well as compare them with the previous generation DDR modules. The manufacturers that were kind enough to send us their modules are Corsair, Kingmax, OCZ Technologies and TwinMOS. Lets take a look at each of these modules

All of the above modules were rated at 4.0-4-4-12 (CAS Latency, RAS# to CAS# Delay 3, RAS# Precharge 2 and Cycle Time). While the Kingmax and TwinMOS modules are DDR533, the OCZ modules support upto DDR666 configuration and the Corsair can go as high as DDR675 to support some further overclocking. Speaking of overclocking, we really weren’t able to test these modules at higher FSBs as the ASUS P5GDC-V motherboard we used as a testbed only overclocked as high as 225MHz and if memory was set at DDR533, this meant that we were touching about DDR580 speeds. All of the modules we tested hit that speed easily. The board does have a “DDR600” option in the BIOS, however, CPUID still reported the memory at 266MHz (DDR533) meaning that it was probably not working. Last thing to note before mentioning the testbest is that all of the modules were 512MB in size except for the Kingmax which was 256MB.