Overclocking Results:

4-4-4-12 5-5-5-15 memory speed: 1040 MHz 1104 MHz If you're new to Overclocking and not sure what to do, check out these two excellent Guides for some pointers: Overclocking the CPU and Memory Overclocking the Videocard

Overclocking DDR2 memory on the AMD Athlon64 Socket AM2 platform is more challenging due to a memory divider issue PCSTATS highlighted in this article. With these limitations, we could only employ even-numbered multipliers when overclocking the Crucial Ballistix PC2-6400 DDR2 memory.

To begin with, the CPU divider was set to 8x and the CAS latency memory timings set to 4-4-4-12. The motherboard clock frequency was increased in 4-6 MHz intervals for the duration of the overclocking tests, from the 200MHz starting point.

The Crucial PC2-6400 DDR-2 memory quickly passed the 220 MHz point, but thereafter required a little more voltage to remain stable (it was increased to 1.9V from 1.8V). At 236 MHz the system started to BSOD while loading into WindowsXP, and again required the voltage to be increased to 2.0V to keep the overclocking going.

In the end the set of Crucial Ballistix PC2-6400 memory maxed out at a speed of 260 MHz (1040 MHz memory frequency) with low latency timings of 4-4-4-12 and a supplied memory voltage of 2.2V. Any settings higher than this resulted in random BSOD's while running evaluation benchmarks.

Since this is DDR2 memory, PCSTATS also tested high the memory would overclock with really loose 5-5-5-15 timings. For this, 2.2V was supplied and the Crucial Ballistix PC2-6400 was pushed to the socket AM2 Foxconn C51XEM2AA motherboard's top speed of 276 MHz (1104 MHz memory frequency).

Prelude to Benchmarks

The details of how the Crucial Ballistix PC2-6400 memory test system was configured for benchmarking, including the specific hardware, software drivers, operating system and benchmark versions are indicated below. In the second column are the general specs for the reference platforms this pair of PC2-6400 DDR-2 memory is to be compared against. Please take a moment to look over PCSTATS test system configurations before moving on to the individual benchmark results.

PCSTATS Test System Configurations

test system reference system processor: amd Athlon64 FX-62 Clock Speed: 14 x 200 MHz = 2.8 GHz 11 x 260 MHz = 2.86 GHz Motherboards: Foxconn C51XEM2AA (NF 590 SLI) Videocard: MSI NX7800GTX-VT2D256E Memory: 2x 1024MB Crucial Ballistix PC2-6400 2x 1024MB Super Talent T800UX2GC4 2x 1024MB Patriot PDC22G8000+XBLK 2x 1024MB Corsair CM2X1024-6400C4 Hard Drive: 74GB Western Digital Raptor WD740 CDROM: AOpen Combo 52x PowerSupply: PC Power & Cooling TurboCool 510 SLI Heatsink: Athlon64 FX-62 Reference Heatsink Software Setup: Microsoft WindowsXP SP2 nVIDIA Forceware NF4 9.34 nVIDIA Forceware 91.27 Benchmarks: Business Winstone 2004 Content Creation 2004 SiSoft Sandra 2005 PCMark05 3DMark05 Doom 3 Quake 4 Battlefield 2