The Tests
The setup is as follows:

• Intel Core 2 Duo 6700 with Arctic Freezer Pro 7
• EVGA nForce 680i motherboard
• Crucial Ballistix Tracer DDR2 PC2-8500
• EVGA GeForce 7800GT
• Antec NeoHE 550w PSU
• Western Digital 150GB Raptor
• Windows XP Professional SP2
• NVIDIA Forceware 97.92 WHQL

We are going to test the Ballistix at three different speeds and timings. The first test will be at stock speeds and timings of 1066MHz and 5-5-5-15. Next we will test them at the lowest timings possible at the stock speed. Finally we will push the speeds as high as we can while keeping our timings as low as possible.

The first step in testing this RAM was to do all of our tests at the stock 1066MHz speed with 5-5-5-15 timings which ran fine at 1.85V, a full 0.35V less than the 2.2V this memory is rated for. After that we booted in to our motherboard’s BIOS and got down to the real work. Using the EVGA board we overclock in the “Unlinked” mode so we don’t have to use a RAM ratio, allowing us to overclock the RAM independently (for the most part) of the front side bus and the CPU. The first step at this point was to push the RAM speed as high as we could while at 5-5-5-15 timings. The maximum speed we could achieve was 1200MHz. Then we loosened up the timings just a bit to 6-5-5-15 and were able to achieve 1244MHz. This was a nearly a 200MHz overclock with minimal changes in the timings and a small voltage bump to 2.2V, which is not really a bump since this is the rated voltage. After that we dropped the speed back down to stock and wanted to achieve the lowest possible timings. We first tried 4-4-4-12 at 1066MHz but for the life of us we could not get Windows to boot properly at stock voltage. We had seen others achieve these settings in their testing, so we bumped the voltage once more to 2.3V and had success. Thus, these three configurations became our testing speeds.


We will be testing with the following applications:

• PC Mark 05 Memory Test
• Half Life 2: Episode 1
• Counter Strike: Source
• Call of Duty 2
• Elder Scrolls: Oblivion
• ScienceMark 2.0 Memory Bandwidth

PCMark 05 memory testing shows us the 1244MHz giving the highest performance of the three settings. Though the latter two speeds are very close to each other, these results clearly show that the stock speeds and timings lag a bit behind here.


ScienceMark 2.0 shows the opposite. The lower timings take the lead here while the highest speed gives us the inferior results. These numbers are all very close and we also have to remember these are arbitrary numbers and don’t reflect real world gameplay, hence why we test with synthetic AND real world benchmarks.