Date: April 24, 1999
Background Info: Kingston Technology has been one of the big names in PC memory modules for quite a long time. In fact I still vividly remember seeing their advertisements in the pages of PC Magazine quite a few years ago. Founded back in 1987 by John Tu and David Sun, they have been producing some of the highest quality memory and storage subsystems. Today Kingston has quite a reputation for providing products that are very reliable, fast and well built. A Briefing On SDRAM: Now, lets get to the heart of the matter, RAM. In case you don't know what it stands for, its Random Access Memory and in this review we will be focusing on a specific type called Synchronous Dynamic Random Access Memory (SDRAM in short). If you have a Pentium II or K6-2, you will most likely be using SDRAM in your system. In fact, most graphics cards manufactures are using SDRAM on their video cards because of their fast performance, abundance of SDRAM and relatively good price. When it comes to SDRAM for your PC, there are quite a few types to choose from, which I will try to make clear for you. Even though SDRAM may seem like just SDRAM, the specs are more important than you may think. The quality and specs of SDRAM in you're system will drastically affect the way your system runs. Ever wonder why you get those dreadful "blue screen" in Windows 95 or 98 for no apparent reason at all?? Well your RAM often has a lot to do with it and so does the quality of the other components in your system. The amount of RAM you have in your systems these days is not the only thing that is important anymore, quality is becoming equally important with the introduction of faster Front Side Bus speeds. If you're not familiar with the PC's front side bus (FSB), it is basically the main communication channel between your processor, cache, RAM and other system components. Before this year, the FSB ran at a maximum of 66MHz but in 1998 we saw the introduction of the 100MHz FSB and in a few months we will start to see motherboards which officially support 133MHz FSB. So what does this all mean? Well it means faster performance for the end-user, but it also means you have to have RAM that is able to keep up with the speeds and the timing must be exact. There is no more room for poorly manufactured chips as there was with the 66MHz bus. That's why Intel introduced the PC100 spec. This spec was designed to ensure strict design and manufacturing specifications of SDRAM rated to run at 100MHz and beyond. However, this spec was extremely hard for manufacturers to achieve back when it was first introduced so we saw a lot of RAM marked as PC100 but they were really not certified and often caused a lot of inconsistency and crashes. As of late, manufacturers have had an easier time adhering to the spec and the quality and reliability of SDRAM has drastically improved. The next issue in RAM performance is the CAS (Column Access Strobe) latency. There are two different choices we have here, CAS 2 or CAS 3. Basically, CAS 2 is a bit faster and allows for higher FSB speeds. The reason for this is because CAS 2 memory accomplishes Column Access Strobes in a minimum of 2 clock cycles rather than 3 clock cycles. This translates to faster overall memory performance but it also allows you to reach higher FSB speeds. CAS 3 ram will not be able to make it up to 133MHz FSB speeds because its just not rated to reach that speed, most CAS 2 RAM may also have a little trouble making it up to that speed but if you drop it down to CAS 3, you should be able to do it. There are a couple more smaller issues when it comes to choosing RAM, for one there is the issue of choosing gold plated pins or tin ones. There have been some issues of corrosion with the tin ones using certain motherboards so you should stick with the gold pins. Gold is also an excellent conductor of electricity and most manufacturers use gold these days anyway. The other issue is the nanosecond rating of the RAM. Most SDRAM are rated at 10ns, some of the better ones are rated at 8ns but none as of yet are rated any lower. There have been many people saying that there is 6ns SDRAM by the number they see on the chip, for example a -6 appended to number on the memory chip. Like the case of Hitachi's memory, this does not necessarily mean it is a 6ns part. Before buying any SDRAM module, you should find out the exact specs, salesman will rarely be able to help you in this field so always check the manufacturers web site if possible. Now that we are a bit more familiar with the important specifics about SDRAM, we can move on with our review. If you would like more information about PC100 SDRAM, check out these two great articles by BXBoards and Super7.net respectively: SDRAM and PC100 Explained. Now on to the review, the SDRAM we are reviewing from Kingston is a 64 MB module that has gold plated pins, CAS latency of 2 and is of the PC100 spec. The chips on the module are NEC chips with a form factor of 8x72. Our test platform will consist of a Celeron 300A, Pentium II 350 (w/L2 Cache off) using an AOpen AX6BC motherboard. We hope to get this module to run stably at FSB speeds of 124MHz+. We're going to compare it to a pretty much standard CAS 3 SDRAM module which uses Samsung's GL chips. Next Page: Specs and Testing Method
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