Surprisingly, the introduction of the DDR2 memory was very slow to take off, as there was very little excitement generated over this new technology. The lack of enthusiasm has derived from DDR2s inability to destroy the original DDR memory right out of the blocks. The sluggish adoption of DDR2 created problems for all platforms concerned. The primary weakness of DDR2 was the poorer memory timings and reasonably mild frequencies. Nevertheless, it has been a year now since this new memory technology was first introduced and much has improved in that time.

For example there are now real performance benefits to be gained when moving from the original DDR technology to DDR2. Initially DDR2 provided little to no performance improvements over DDR400 as it was only clocked at 533MHz (DDR). Now DDR2 has moved to DDR2-667 and beyond, making for substantial improvement in memory bandwidth. Many motherboard makers are now also boasting official DDR2-800 support for many of their high-end products. This means a single DDR2-800 memory module is capable of producing a theoretical maximum memory bandwidth of 6.4GB/s.

This is of course very impressive in itself, though considering a dual channel figure would be pointing towards almost 13.0GB/s it is just amazing. Currently the latest Intel Pentium processor can only utilize a maximum memory bandwidth of 10.7GB/s, which can be achieved using DDR2-667 memory. However, there is still a very important need for DDR2 memory that can operate at 800MHz and beyond. The need to overclock is why these memory types already exist today and they are doing the overclocking cause a great justice. The ability to run a Pentium processor on a 300MHz+ FSB is now possible with a 1:1 CPU/memory ratio.

Today I will be looking at the high frequency Dual-Channel PC2-6400 memory modules. The OCZ DDR2 PC2-6400 Gold memory is rated at CAS5-5-5-10 and as the name suggests, wrapped in shiny gold heat spreaders. Rated at PC6400 means these memory modules are designed to operate at 800MHz DDR. These DDR2 PC2-6400 Gold memory modules come with a life time warranty and are guaranteed to operate at the specified timings, voltages and frequencies. Although, OCZ claim that these modules are optimized for the Intel 955X chipset, they have been benchtested using an nForce4 SLI motherboard.