The face of RAM for PC’s has finally made a full move towards DDR2.  Intel started things off with DDR-2 only support on their chipsets for LGA775 processors, however the lackluster performance of both the Prescott and DDR2 timings proved to be debilitating for moving the performance market over to DDR2.

However in the last few months we have seen Intel move back in to top spot on processor performance with the Core 2 Duo, and the release of AM2 – AMD’s final (we hope) socket revision for the current CPU architecture – which includes DDR2 support, the final push to get DDR2 in the limelight.

With this move for both mainstream and enthusiast into DDR2, the technology has come into it’s own, with over 1000MHz DDR speeds with timings we expected at 500MHz only a year ago.  With most people these days buying into either Core 2 Duo or AM2 (and mostly the latter) the market for high end dims is booming.

Into the fray come A-Data.  Started in 2001, A-Data now supplies a huge amount of the worlds DRAM module needs.  A-Data  also are a major player in the flash-disk market.  Although they started small, all the founding members were experienced in the memory market, and that experience has bought them their success. 

A-Data have mostly been known for value DRAM modules since their inception.   Now they have used their previous experience as well as that gained in the last 5 years to create some nice enthusiast products. 

They have been nice enough to send us at XtremeComputing a set of their fastest RAM available, and rightly so as it is called the Xtreme-Edition memory, it is DDR2 1000MHz with timings of 5-5-5-15.  It’s amazing that 2 years ago we would have looked at 533MHz DDR2 Ram with the same timings -

Even with this sort of high-speed RAM flying about, I have to ask the question – is it really worth the expense?  Hopefully Adata will answer that question for us here.

Next Page - Presentation