Mushkin HP2-6400 2 x 1GB DDR2

Examination:

Mushkin advertises these FrostByte heatspreaders as offering superior thermal efficiency to improve durability and performance. There are three versions of the FrostByte, with the version coming equipped to the HP (High Performance) series being blue. These heatsinks should be able to assist in the cooling of the RAM and hopefully lead to a slightly better overclock. On both sides of the heatspreader is Mushkin's logo printed, while on one side is the part sticker. The sticker contains the memory capacity, frequency, and timings. With an SPD frequency of DDR2-800MHz these modules are competitively timed at 4-5-4-11, and the voltage supported is up to 2.2V.

Performance:

For testing these RAM modules, we had loaded them up in the following i975X system:

Using our standard set of GNU/Linux memory benchmarks we had used Enemy Territory, Doom 3, LAME Compilation, LAME Encoding, FreeBench, and RAMSpeed. With the recent LAME update to 3.97, we have now upgraded our benchmarking configuration to use this latest release. This benchmarking was also performed with the recent release of Fedora Core 6 Zod. We had benchmarked the RAM at DDR2-667 and DDR2-800 speeds along with overclocking the RAM to DDR2-920 speeds. Unfortunately, the system configuration was not able to run stable at a high overclock, though we had breached the DDR2-1000 barrier but would face memtest86+ v1.65 issues. We had also fed the Mushkin HP2-6400 modules up to 2.40V during our overclocking endeavor.

2800MHz (200MHz x 14) - DDR2-667MHz @ 4-5-4-11
2800MHz (200MHz x 14) - DDR2-800MHz @ 4-5-4-11
3220MHz (230MHz x 14) - DDR2-920MHz @ 5-5-5-15