Test Bed:

• Intel Pentium 4 530J (Varying Clocks)
• Asus P5WD2-E Premium
• 2x1024MB Modules Ultra PC2-6400 (Varying Clocks)
• Ultra X2 550W PSU
• Open Air Chassis

Ah yes, the joys of a new platform. In the footsteps of Intel us reviewers must follow, updating our platform as technology would dictate. Today’s little update to the flock is the shedding of the Gigabyte 8I955X Royal, who’s notably buggy memory controller wouldn’t let anything over 960MHz pass through. Through sheer frustration, and pending reviews, a choice needed to be made – and that choice turned out to be a necessary move to a P5WD2 Premium motherboard. As fate would have it, suppliers far and wide ran dry in the way of this particular board, so, impatient and emboldened, we just hopped to the next notch up – the P5WD2-E Premium. The inclusion of the 975X chipset on today’s review motherboard will mean that we’ll be testing all sorts of memory on the newest platform possible, with the highest clocks, and most accurate results. With that being said, let’s move on to the standard performance drivel.

Well then, this is where the product confidence turns out to be rather well placed. With speeds equal to, or within 1% of the top dog, Ultra’s modules really strut their stuff, opening the floor up with some quite enthusing performance. This can be attributed to the relatively tight latencies, and the way they interact with the memory chips – after all, with capacity, voltage, and speeds equal to those of Mushkin, who wouldn’t have suspected this lead. With this stock performance behind us, let’s see just how fast these sticks go when things let loose.

Interestingly enough, even with the lax latencies, the Ultra memory manages to hold it’s own in the respective categories. Though, it wouldn’t be quite fair to classify it in the same string when the frequency is at 888MHz as opposed to 667. Apart from that, we can see that this kit will make a good contender for our top kits in the average user’s system. With that in mind, let’s get on to seeing just how we wound these sticks right up.

Overclocking
Ah, overclocking seems to be a dream’s ultimatum, placed in order to gain entry into reality. The idea of course, is being more for less – or for simplicity’s sake, free performance. Unfortunately, this simple idea also tends to often result in wild demonstrations of excess – far advanced cooling, specialty motherboards, or in our particular case, high performance memory. As it stands right now, many motherboards impose a limit (set by Intel in their infinite wisdom) of 667 MHz, with memory chugging along at 800MHz being considered an overclocker’s fancy. In reality though, there is a slight gain to be found in performance when making the jump in both speeds and latencies – and this is at the point where overclocking pays off. In that spirit, memory of these speeds is almost a necessity, as there isn’t much of a point in pushing your machine to the limit, only to have to gear memory back time after time. With that in mind, let’s see how much father into beyond ultra’s goods can push, shall we?

Perhaps the first note sung at this portion of the review landed flat; or perhaps it was just poor luck of the draw. Either way, the overclocking section for this memory started flat on its feet. With absolutely no headroom to gain with the stock 4-4-4 latencies, they unfortunately had to be boosted, in an effort to keep the memory on par. That means, while the competition pulls ahead, Ultra’s sticks will, unfortunately, be stuck with a disadvantage. How much of one you might ask? That, you’d know through a performance section read.

Nevertheless, we took the processor to the first milestone with ease on these new, relaxed timings, giving the ICs the spring that was needed in order to make it to the first (albeit slightly revised) milestone of 888Mhz. To those wondering why we’d use this odd number, it’s simply because at this point, the difference between memory at 667MHz and 888MHz can be seen, though usually with the same latencies.

Thankfully, the loosened latencies than gave the much needed headroom to push to the second milestone (though again, it’s more of a sub-milestone now) of 960MHz. Now, while most of the time such abrupt jumps are met with shaky resistance from the memory, Ultra’s sticks seemed to oblige us, driving with whispers to go on, and hit that mark so many users could benefit from.

With our newfound hope in this memory, we made the jump from 240 to 250MHz on the FSB, a jump which would result in a memory clock of 1,000MHz… and a tasty black screen. Unfortunately, the strength which had carried the memory thus far, and the micron ICs which powered her could be no more. There just wasn’t enough left in them to make it to PC2-8000. Bummer. Given Micron’s stellar track record with memory, we’re not exactly sure what went wrong here, though a 160MHz increase can hardly be considered a minor one, when you think about it.