With the prices of DDR2 ram dropping like a cheap hooker's panties, there are a HUGE range of choices to choose from. I had just recently bought a 2gb kit from
EwizThis particular kit had been hovering around 80-90 dollars plus shipping and tax, but they had a 2 day sale and lowered the price to $68 with free shipping. It was way too good of a deal to pass up since this supposedly had the famous Micron D9 chips in them that everyone wanted their hands on.
Heres a pic (taken from Ewiz's site):
Heres the setup I was using for this ram:
ASUS P5B Vanilla
Intel Core2Duo E4300
Seasonic S12 500W
EVGA 7900GTO
Now more info about the ram, stock timings on them are 5-5-5-15@DDR800 at 1.8V. It's got some heatspreaders on them, which IMO don't do anything at all but I guess memory manufacturers think they'll look cool. I won't bother with how the ram performs stock, so lets jump right into the overclocking.
WARNING: If you don't know what you're doing DONT OVERCLOCK any part of your system, things can break if you don't know what you're doing. Now onto the overclocking!
With the SuperTalents, it ran fine at stock settings at 1.8V. But that doesn't seem like much of a feat, so I gradually started upping the FSB each by 10mhz at the stock voltage. Once windows wasn't able to boot, I upped the voltage by .05V everytime until I was able to boot windows. I didn't really pay attention inbetween, but I managed to get the ram to 517mhz at 2.15V Thats DDR1033 for $68 folks on STOCK timings.
Performance wasn't too suprising, it was almost exactly the same memory bandwith as some ram at the same speed and same cas latency:
Overall, this is a GREAT buy if you're looking to upgrade to that Core2Duo system or AM2 system and want some ram that won't hinder your overclocking.
For those of you who are looking for some cheaper ram, Ewiz also has the DDR667 kit typically for 20-30 dollars cheaper than the DDR800 kit. Though it is probably a good idea for the DDR800 to go back on sale, both kits overclock pretty well, so it's a win win whichever kit you get.