Patriot Extreme Performance DDR2 2GB (2 x 1GB) PC2-8500 RAM Review

Former staff writer , Tallman - March 8, 2007

Lowest Prices

Testing:

Testing Setup:

Intel Conroe 6700 air cooled with Scythe Mine III cooler
Asus P5W-DH Deluxe Wi-fi
Patriot Extreme Performance DDR2 2GB (2 x 1 GB) PC2-8500 Eased Latency Kit
OCZ2P10002GEEK (2 x 1 GB) PC2-8000 EP XTC 4-5-4-15 Kit
BFG 7600GT GPU
OCZ GameXtreme 600W PSU
WD 250 GB SATA2 (2500KS) HDD
Plextor 716a CD/DVD RW
Windows XP Pro SP2

Benchmarks and Apps:

CPU-Z
Task Manager
Cachemem
PCMark05
SiSoft Sandra
Far Cry

The first thing I have to say, I am doing these tests with the whole system in a case with the enclosure all buttoned up to get real world results. No huge fans blowing on things to inflate the results. Also, since the OCZ ram that I am going to compare this Patriot ram to has tighter timings, all the tests done with the OCZ ram will be set at 5-5-5-9 to get an apples-to-apples result. And, since the Patriot ram is rated at higher frequency than the OCZ ram, I am curious to see if the OCZ can keep up at higher clock speeds.

Due to some of the limitations of my motherboard, I cannot set the speed to 1066 MHz, so 1068 MHz is as close as I can get. You will also notice in the CPU-Z shots that the cpu speed to ram speed ratio changes from time to time. This is because I had to lower my fsb speed and slow the processor down because it would not overclock high enough to get the ram speed where I wanted it.

So, first up is CPU-Z which reads information from your system and displays it on our screen for you.

CPU-Z

Task Manager

Now we have Task Manager to show that it is indeed 2 GB of memory, Kernel memory, and Page file usage.

Cachemem Test at 1068MHz

Cachemem gives results of read and write speeds of the ram. The results are in the graphs below.

Higher is Better

PCMark05

With PCMark05 we test the PC's performance as a system. Again, these tests were run with each set of modules in the system.

Higher is Better

SiSoft Sandra

Now we are starting to get into the more serious stuff. SiSoftware Sandra is going to test for latency (random access time), bandwidth, and a combined index of cache and memory. This proved to be the most difficult test to pass as I went higher with the clock speeds, in particular, the combined index.

Latency Test

Lower is Better

Bandwidth Test

Higher is Better

Cache and Memory Test

Higher is Better

Lower is Better

Far Cry

I used the Hardware OC (Ubisoft Volcano) test to look for changes in frames per second of the playing demo when we start pushing the ram modules to see how well they overclock. In this test I am running the ram at 1068MHz. The benchmark will be run at resolutions of 800 x 600, 1024 x 768, and 1280 x 1024. For all of the Far Cry tests, Higher scores are Better.