Kingmax Mars DDR2-667 KLCC28F-A8EB5

Conclusion:

Looking back at our memory results, we were not very impressed by the SPD timings of 5-5-5-15 and the Elpida ICs not giving any overclocking headroom. However, once the latencies were tightened down to 3-3-3-8 it was almost unbelievable while at the same time it was completely stable in all of our tests. Corsair's XMS2 PC2-5400UL which are SPD programmed at 4-4-4-12 and are guaranteed by Corsair to perform at 3-3-2-8 sell for $310 (2 x 512MB) where these Kingmax puppies we had running at 3-3-3-8 sell for a mere $160 (~ $80 per 512MB). Not only were we impressed by the CAS timings but also the ability to run the RAM at 850MHz. Whether we simply had a good batch from Kingmax, or all of their DDR2 modules are performing this phenomenally, it will be quite interesting to see how it plays out. Clear across the board, we were able to see definitive gains from tweaking the memory, with numbers comparable to that of Corsair. With these memory tweaks, we were able to see the improvements in all of our benchmarks, except for Doom 3 where of course the NVIDIA 6600GT was the limiting factor in the situation with the desired resolution and image quality. With the 2.3V required to run the Kingmax KLCC28F-A8EB5 at 3-3-3-8, it would've been interesting if we were able to provide slightly more voltages to the DDR2 slots to see if we could have possibly matched Corsair's times. However, the ASUS motherboard used in this testing offered a maximum allowable voltage of 2.30V as going much higher could possibly damage the DIMMs. Coming into this review, we never had a dream that there would be budget DDR2 modules with 5-5-5-15 timings and are able to successfully tighten to 3-3-3-8, but we were so quickly turned around when we began overclocking. Although the Kingmax KLCC28F-A8EB5 DDR2-667 512MB modules may have characteristics of being budget RAM with its low price tag, no heatspreaders, and use of high-latency Elpida chips, the performance we experienced today shares a truly different story.