Home : Hardware : Reviews : OCZ DDR2 PC2-6400 Platinum Revision 2 Dual Channel RAM
OCZ’s second revision of their Platinum PC2-6400 RAM is a strong performer with a lot of potential for tweaking.
Introduction
Random Access Memory. It’s not the most underrated part of any rig (that would be you, power supply unit), but it’s pretty close, especially when it comes to overclocking. However, that hasn’t stopped the specialty RAM market from developing into a quite a force over the past few years. These days, you can go for the generic stuff or you can buy RAM that feature specially designed heat spreaders, guaranteed lower timings, hand-tested quality control requirements and flashy looks designed to attract those who want their RAM to look and act superior to the standard product.
It’s not just for show, either; companies like OCZ build their specialty RAM to perform under highly stressful situations, like overclocking, where ordinary RAM would fail. The question we want to answer, of course, is whether or not paying the extra money for higher-end RAM is worth it; to find out, today we’re testing OCZ’s DD2 PC2-6400 Platinum Revision 2 in a dual channel kit of 1 GB per stick. 
Performance
The PC2-6400 Platinum Revision 2 features the standard 800 MHz clock that is the hallmark of PC2-6400 memory, timings of 4-4-4-15, energy use of 1.9 – 2.0 volts and OCZ’s ace in the hole: the Xtreme Thermal Convection (XTC) heat spreader. The XTC uses a honeycomb design that claims to spread heat and increase ventilation, reducing the amount of heat that hits the memory chips and theoretically increasing performance. On the PC2-6400 Platinum Revision 2, the XTC heat spreader is an attractive silver color and adds a nice touch to your rig’s internals. We’ll see how well the spreader works, however.
To test the OCZ DD2 PC2-6400 Platinum, I dropped it into my test bed, set up as follows:
Processor: AMD Athlon X2 Dual-Core 4200+ 65W
Motherboard: ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe wireless
Video Card: XFX GeForce 7900 GS ExTreme in SLI configuration
Power Supply: OCZ nVIDIA SLI-Ready GameXStream 600W
Hard Drive: Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 750 GB
OS: Windows XP SP2
Testing Software: SiSoft Sandra 2007 SP1
Before looking at these results, you should note that the ASUS motherboard set the RAM timings to 5-5-5-15-2T, so these results reflect those timings. SiSoft Sandra 2007 came back with the following from the memory bandwidth test:
RAM Bandwidth Integer Buffered iSSE2: 7,379 MB/s
RAM Bandwidth Float Buffered iSSE2: 7,311 MB/s
Afterwards, I went into the BIOS, adjusted the timings to 4-4-4-12-1T and ran the memory bandwidth test again:
RAM Bandwidth Integer Buffered iSSE2: 7,912 MB/s
RAM Bandwidth Float Buffered iSSE2: 7,910 MB/s
