Good things come in two-by-twos

7 May 2008 | 22:21 BST

By Paul Taylor

Product: Mushkin XP2-6400 2x2GB
Website: Mushkin Web store
Price: $123.92

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MUSHKIN'S XP2-6400 memory caught our eye a while back when it came out as 2x1GB. Now that they’re nicely packed in 2GB sticks, we’re prodding it with our stun baton and getting it to some pretty high speeds (for DDR2). It *is* DDR2, however, and the DDR3-money-flashing crowd will probably scoff at this – but they should read it just to feel extremely ripped-off and humbled.

Memory makers (and consumers) are going through a transition phase right now, shifting to 2x2GB kits rather than forcing users to max-out their slots with a bunch of 1GB DIMMS. Mushkin sent their kit in their new retail pack, a sort of DVD case (Amaray-stylee), nicely packed, really. It’s a classy touch, as the case has DIMM holders inside where you just snap your DDR2 into, keeping them safe.

The kit itself comes with Mushkin’s trademark Frostbyte heatspreader, only this time in white. It looks good once slotted in, and the heatspreader doesn’t require any clearance overhead. You can see the sticker on the side with the convenient timings and voltage rating – although the Mushkin XP2-6400 comes with an EPP Profile (which is just a fancy way of the memory telling the system what it can do and letting it load memory presets automatically).

Naturally EPP comes in handy if you’re running the presets but not really necessary if you’re fooling around with overclocks.

Default timings are 4-4-4-12 – pretty run o’ the mill nowadays for DDR2 and 2.05-2.1v is also pretty much the standard. So what’s so special about it? Well, first of all, it’s packed on both sides – accounting for 2GB on each stick.

Effectively you can pack up to 8GB of DDR2 into a mainstream motherboard, for a very low price – as long as the mobo supports them, which takes us to our next point.

We had Intel’s X38 and P35 mobos in the office, but those couldn’t work the necessary magic to trick out the memory timings, so we rang up our man at Abit and bummed them for their preciousssss IX38 Quad GT. Actually we bummed them for something that could handle EPP, but they didn’t have SLI-enabled mobos at the moment, so they got the next best thing, an X38 mobo with something called µGuru.

I’ll go ahead and sing the praises of the Abit crew and the IX38 Quad GT right now. Yessiree. Rang them up on Monday, Thursday a UPS chappie came a-knockin’ with an IX38 Quad GT in hand. This took care of business and more... this was my first contact with the µGuru chip/feature and all I can say is it makes life easier in sooo many ways.

Overclocking, especially with this BIOS, was utterly easy – our only limit was how far the memory itself would take us. Oddly, the Abit board defaulted the CPU clock speed slightly over-stock.

In other words, our E6850 that should be running on a 333MHz bus at 3GHz, was actually running at 340MHz (3.06GHz), and memory automatically defaulted to 816MHz. Not that it was a problem - at all. Popping into the BIOS, µGuru lets us keep tabs on that and any overclocking settings, voltages, temps and fan speeds. It’s a veritable overclocker-fest. The only drawback on this motherboard was that it didn’t support the .5 multipliers, which left us with 6-9x multipliers.

Inside Windows there’s the µGuru app running in the system tray and this offers you the same features you get in the BIOS - you can even create overclocking profiles that load up at boot-time.

We probed around a bit with the timings and clock speeds until we were satisfied with what seemed to be a stable overclock (DDR2-1100). Memtest 86+ ran the DDR2-800 and DDR2-1100, 10 passes each without fault. Boring as hell, but a necessary evil to make sure everything’s working. Here's a shot of CPU-Zedd with the 1100 clock.

Next we started on Lavalys Everest Ultimate Edition testing settings and probing which one performed best overall. There’s a bit of a compromise here. You can go for a greater FSB overclock - we pushed the E6850 to 3.6GHz upping the FSB to 400MHz and overclocked the memory to 1000MHz or you can set the system to 3.3GHz with the memory running at 1100MHz.

Overall the 3.6@1000MHz offered the highest stability and performance.

Where's the catch?
Mushkin has been making a name for itself for a while now and, although it’s always interesting to hear about world record-breaking achievements by German fellows, it really sinks in when you fool around with a nice piece of kit like this one. OK, if you haven’t figured it out, the XP2-6400 2x2GB kit performs well, overclocks nicely and, best of all, it’s easy on the wallet.

Maxing out a mobo with 8GB of this memory will cost less than $250. It's a great deal, if you ask us. The only catch here is that the market is chock-full of memory makers offloading cheap DDR2, and you - the consumer - will be caught in-between sales, deals and heavily discounted products.

Cheap Trick of the Day Addendum
To all you enthusiasts out there, let me impart a bit of wisdom that’s been around for at least eight years now – so it isn’t new, but from what I’ve garnered it’s mostly unknown. You probably spend a lot of time clearing CMOSs and resetting BIOS settings, booting up, crashing, etc... (wash, lather, rinse, repeat if necessary). While motherboard makers go to great lengths to make life easier on enthusiasts - like Abit including a CCMOS button on the back panel (good stuff, btw!) there is a much simpler way to do this.

Just cold boot with the Insert key pressed (even works on USB keyboards) and you’re back, with the system defaulting to safe settings, letting you go into the BIOS and changing whatever you need. This means you needn’t short any jumpers, press trick buttons or pluck away at the CR2032 battery.

There you go.

The Good: Great overclocking potential, cheap as the proverbial chip, cool... very cool

The Bad: Nothing really, except the overkill of memory kit on the market that'll confuse consumers

The Ugly: None whatsoever

Bartender’s Verdict

© 2007 Incisive Media Investments Ltd. 2007