Until recently good DDR memory was hard to find and there were only few players out there on the market Corsair, Mushkin, OCZ and KingMAX. Now that JEDEC has approved a DDR333 standard the market has been flooded with DDR333 memory and it's even possible to purchase generic DDR333 modules.

Just by looking at the DIMM, you know the 256MB KingMAX DDR333 is something special. KingMAX is the only memory manufacturer that equips their DIMM's with BGA DRAM modules and It's not just for looks either, at 166 MHz+ FSB's DRAM based on TSOP-II does get very warm and almost hot to the touch while at the same speeds BGA based memory only gets warm.

Our 256MB KingMAX DDR333 test sample was equipped with 5ns DRAM and has a CAS Latency of 2.5 which isn't surprising since 99% of PC2700 memory is CL 2.5 by SPD. As you can see from the picture on the left the KingMAX DRAM has a 5ns rating which means it should run up to 200 MHz no problem. Another thing that interested us was t he actual DRAM that is used KDL684T4A2A-05 is the same DRAM that is on KingMAX's PC3200 (DDR400) DIMM's! The PCB however was based on the older MPM62D-68KX3 revision.

One thing to keep in mind though when buying memory, the KingMAX DDR333/PC2700 is not JEDEC approved rather it's just compliant with their standard.

Overclocking:

So how would the KingMAX DDR333 memory do? Overall I'd say we've been lucky with our memory. Most sticks of RAM we have overclock pretty well after all just look at our Mushkin Enhanced High Performance PC2100 it would hit 178 MHz FSB, our Corsair XMS2400 would do 170 MHz and our OCZ PC3000 would do 200 MHz. Would the KingMAX DDR333 continue this trend?

Things didn't start off very well, we stuck the memory into our reference Epox 8K3A+, adjusted the FSB to 166 MHz (rather then use an async FSB/Memory setting), set all the memory timings to the most aggressive in the BIOS and we hit our first problem, no POST. Remembering the memory is only rated CL2.5 we changed the memory timings to most conservative and the memory worked flawlessly. Obviously with those timings however our overall performance wasn't very good. We decided to up the memory voltage a bit to see if we could stabilize the RAM. We needed a voltage of 2.8V to get the KingMAX DDR333 to run properly with the fastest timings at 166 MHz. After we started to up the FSB a little and hit another problem at 175 MHz. At the end the highest FSB we were able to hit was 179 MHz FSB with a voltage of 2.9V. Yes the 8K3A+ offers higher memory voltage settings, but we didn't use them since most other boards don't offer them that high and it didn't help in our overclocking attempts anyway. 179 MHz FSB, not bad but a little disappointing since we had 5ns DRAM.