Computex 2008 - Part 8

Chris Cloran, AMD's Corporate VP and GM of Computing Solutions Group (Notebook Division), was heading the Puma launch and in this slide, compares video quality performance of the new IGP versus that of Intel's current GM965 class. Of course this comparison will change shortly as Intel's Centrino 2 platform takes off in a couple of months.

OCZ DDR3-1600 Platinum Triple Channel 6Gb Kit

"We take a look at OCZ's DDR3-1600 Platinum Triple Channel 6Gb Kit. These modules are rated to run at 800Mhz and offers an extremely low latency of 7-7-7-24."



Tags : DDR3 DDR3 1600 Memory OCZ OCZ technology pc3 12800 ram Review tri channel Triple Channel 6gb kit



Posted on Feb 26, 2009, 1:10 AM UTC by Winston Chim
Source : OCZ Technology

Product Name OCZ Triple Channel DDR3-1600 6Gb Kit
Category Memory
Manufacturer OCZ Technology
Prices from Compare3D
Featured OCZ 3xDDR3-1600 Platinum 6Gb Kit USD $ 114.99 (3 sellers)
Similar OCZ DDR3 6GB (3x2) Platinum 1333Mhz GBP £ 86.76 (4 sellers)


Introduction Specifications and Features Closer Look: The Modules 6Gb Kit Installation Test Setup and Procedures CPU-Z and Everest Sandra Pro 2009 Futuremark Suite Gaming and ScienceMark 2 Overclocking Verdict and Conclusion
Introduction
The launch of Intel's Core i7 processor last November has been one of the most anticipated releases of 2008. Although it did require a new motherboard and new triple channel DDR3 memory ... the performance from these new processors was phenomenal, receiving rave reviews from around the world. It quickly became the processor of choice for the extreme gamer and hardcore enthusiasts.

Many manufacturers, especially Intel partners, saw this as a good opportunity to introduce new products to cater for these new Core i7 processors. In no time we saw the release of new motherboards featuring Intel's X58 chipset from Asus, ASRock, DFI, Gigabyte, MSI and many more. Then, the first batch of triple channel memory modules started to appear from Corsair, A-dat, Kingston and OCZ Technology.





Intel's new Core i7 processors may be all singing and dancing, but one of the hardest hurdle for consumers to overcome ... is cost. If you want to take advantage of all this new technology, you'll be looking at a new motherboard, new triple channel DDR3 ram and of course the new Core i7 processor itself. All-in-all, a pretty big upgrade with a price tag to match! I guess this is the kind of price premium one has to pay for all this new technology. But hopefully the cost will come down during the course of 2009.

Over the past few months we've taken a look at triple channel memory from Corsair, A-data, Kingston, and now it's now the turn of OCZ Technology. There's one interesting fact that many people don't realise ... OCZ were one of the first manufacturers to introduce and release their triple channel DDR3 memory kits before anyone else. Being memory experts, their modules not only performs ... but also carry a wealth of certifications from Intel, Nvidia and AMD.





We already seen how successful OCZ Technology have become over the past year or so. And this is evident from the huge range of innovative products in their catalogue. These include their new "Fatal1ty" Series, the infamous NIA (Neural Impulse Actuator), a new range of gaming peripherals, and then there's the usual flash media, SSDs, PSUs, cooling products and DIY notebooks. Wow, what a list!

In this review, we'll be taking a look at the OCZ Platinum DDR2-1600 Triple Channel 6Gb kit. The Platinum Series are optimized with leading-edge Enhanced Latency and Enhanced Bandwidth technology to deliver the highest overclocks and tightest timings. These modules are rated PC3-12800 and are able to run at 800Mhz, and what's more they also feature their innovative XTC heatspreader which helps to provide effecient cooling. Here's a little blurb taken from OCZ's website ...

"XTC (Xtreme Thermal Convection) heatspreaders optimize the thermal management of memory modules by promoting greater airflow by means of micro-convection throughout what is usually the dead air space inside conventional heatspreader designs. In this manner, build-up of heat is avoided and thermal dissipation of the memory components is offloaded more efficiently through the honeycomb design. At the same time, mechanical stability is maintained."





Although these modules are optimised to run with Intel Core i7 processors, they do not feature Intel Extreme Memory Profiles (XMP). This doesn't mean that these Platinum Series are no good ... quite the opposite. OCZ's Platinum modules are designed to offers the latest extreme speeds, ideal for overlocking enthusiasts. What makes these modules different from the rest, is that they offer an extremely low latency of 7-7-7-24, while maintaining a low voltage of 1.65V. Most triple channel DDR3-1600 kits have a memory latency of 8-8-8-24. If you require XMP ready kits ... then you might want to take a look at OCZ's Intel Extreme Series.



The labelling and classification of DDR3 memory can be a little confusing at times, but I'll try and give you some DDR3 terminology ... More information can be found HERE

- PC3-6400 : DDR3-800 : 200FSB : 400Mhz (800Mhz)
- PC3-8500 : DDR3-1066 : 266FSB : 533Mhz (1066Mhz)
- PC3-10666 : DDR3-1333 : 333FSB : 667Mhz (1333Mhz)
- PC3-12800 : DDR3-1600 : 400FSB : 800Mhz (1600Mhz)
- PC3-14400 : DDR3-1800 : 450FSB : 900Mhz (1800Mhz)
- PC3-15000 : DDR3-1866 : 466FSB : 933Mhz (1866Mhz)
- PC3-16000 : DDR3-2000 : 500FSB : 1000Mhz (2000Mhz)



In our tests we'll be installing these modules on a Gigabyte EX58-Extreme motherboard, along with our Intel Core i7 - 920 processor and a Geforce GTX285 OC graphics card, PC Power & Cooling 860W PSU, running Windows Vista. We'll be comparing these modules with others

OK, let's not waste any more time and take a closer look at the OCZ Platinum DDR3-1600 PC3-12800 Triple Channel 6Gb Kit ...

Toshiba Portege A100 Centrino 12"SuperView WiFi (2.2Kg

Highlights: Beautiful Ultra-Portable / Absolutely 100% Brand New Condition
- Centrino Intel Pentium-M 1.4Ghz with SpeedStep Technology
- 512mb DDR333 (2x512mb) Upgradeable to 1Gb
- 40Gb ATA100 5400RPM Upgradeable to 100Gb
- Bright 12.1inch XGA Clear SuperView Display(1024x768)

- Internal DVD + CD-Writer Combo Drive
- Internal Intel WiFi 802.11b
- Firewire Ports + 4-USB2.0 Ports

- Licensed Xp-Professional with Complete recovery DVD
- Tested 180-minute Battery!
- Store Warranty: 3month Parts + 6-Months Service


Our Take: After the initial rush to get UMPCs (Ultra-Mobile PC) users began to realize an 8.9" display is too small for everyday use and that in today's world it is still difficult to live without an optical drive. Moreover, as benchmarks have shown, an ATOM processor is not necessarily "faster" than the older Pentium-M variants. If you co not believe us there is an article about it and . After the hype, it maybe time to take a 2nd look at the old reliable Pentium-M. discover why it is one of the CoolTOYZ favorite laptops.

Enhance your mobile lifestyle and express yourself with the attractive 2.2Kg Portégé A100. Designed for the most mobile business users, students and individuals, the Portégé A100 delivers exceptional on-the-road performance with a 12inch Clear SuperView / full color display, built-in wireless networking, plus integrated CDRW/DVD Combo drive, and a Full set of expansion ports. The Toshiba Portege A100 is a smart choice if you want the style and portability of the iBook without the limitations and premium price of the Mac platform.

With its pearl-white casing and clean lines, the Toshiba Portege A100 looks unmistakably like an iBook - – note the white, reinforced, A4- sized body, 12-inch screen and svelte dimensions. If not for the Centrino sticker on the palm rest and Toshiba label, most people will easily mistake the A100 for an Apple machine. The Lid is an attractive pearl white clear coat / glossy white finish. Open up the A100 and you'll see a white bezel surrounding the screen and a white keyboard centred in a matt silver chassis. Apple clone or not, the Portege A100 looks good.



Beyond the stylish exterior, the A100 carries the full Centrino certification which means that there's an Intel Pentium M CPU inside, as well as an Intel wireless networking card. Looking at the Intel Pentium M CPU first, you'll find a 1.4GHz chip, which is more than powerful enough for a notebook like this. The Intel Pentium M CPU is based on the new micro architecture optimized for mobile PCs which is more efficient, consumes less energy and runs longer with the batteries as compared to standard modern systems. It's equipped with the low-voltage 400MHz system bus, 1MB L2 cache that disables blocks unused, and special functions for reducing platform's power consumption. The CPU supports the advanced Intel® SpeedStep® technology with several frequencies and voltage values. Benchmarks tests shows it to be equivalent to an Intel Penitum4 2.6Ghz Processor. The processor is supported by 512MB of PC2100 DDR SDRAM (expandable to 1GB), and a 40GB hard disk.

The 12.1in. TFT screen with a 1024x768 resolution is superb. It is enhanced with Toshiba's Clear SuperView technology - the latest in LCD screen technology commonly known in the industry as anti-reflective. This technology has one much praise for its high-gloss, sharp contrast, anti-reflective finish. This new anti-reflective technology has sharp contrast ratios (the difference between the deepest black and lightest white pixels), produces clearer and more colorful images, absorbs most external ambient light and has wider viewing angles than traditional notebook screens. It is not only superb for playing DVD and computer games, but also good for presentation to client and deskwork, giving users excellent experience on both digital entertainment and productivity. Once you have seen this technology for yourself, you won’t believe your eyes.The display's Graphics is provided by Intel's 855GM Graphics Controller comes with 64MB of shared memory.



The integrated CD-WRITER/DVD Combo drive allows writing CDs and reading of DVDs at maximum speed. You also get a good set of connectivity options. Connectivity include Intel's Pro Wireless Network Connection 802.11b (802.11g optional), a V.90 modem, 10/100Base-T, four USB 2.0 ports, one SD slot, composite TV-out, FireWire and two PC Card slots. The removable Lithium-ion battery is tested to power the system for up to an impressive 2.5 hours.

Intel GMA950 & xf86-video-intel 2.1.0

It was earlier this month that version 2.1.0 of the xf86-video-intel driver was released, which among other things had introduced open-source Linux graphics support for the G33, Q33, and Q35 chipsets as well as fixing a horde of bugs and adding PCI IDs for the 945GME, 965GME, and 965GLE chips. As our last Intel graphics performance article was looking at the Q965 back in May, in this article we have enclosed some benchmarks from Intel's GMA 950 IGP using the new xf86-video-intel 2.1.0 driver.



The motherboard we had used when carrying out these latest tests was the ASRock Conroe1333-DVI/H R2.0. This ATX motherboard uses Intel's 945G/945GC A2 Chipset with the ICH7 Southbridge and boasts support for dual-core 1333MHz FSB LGA-775 processors. Offered by the ASRock Conroe1333-DVI/H R2.0 motherboard is an onboard VGA D-Sub connector for the integrated GMA 950 graphics, while also included is a DVI graphics HDCP-capable adapter. We will be featuring a review of the Conroe1333-DVI/H R2.0 later in the month.

Other hardware components had included an Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 processor and 2 x 1024MB of OCZ Reaper HPC 2GB PC2-8500 memory. The operating system used was Fedora 7 with the 2.6.21-1.3228.fc7 kernel and we had upgraded the X.Org drivers from Fedora Rawhide, which includes the Intel 2.1.0 Linux display driver. The graphics processor used for comparison was the ATI Radeon X800XL 256MB PCI Express x16 solution with the open-source ATI Radeon 6.6.3 driver. The benchmarks used in this graphics comparison were Enemy Territory, Doom 3, and Unreal Tournament 2004; however, there are some missing textures present with Doom 3 using the open-source ATI/Intel drivers. This article is intended to offer just a glance at the level of performance offered by the Intel GMA 950 using the latest driver compared to the Radeon X800XL. Additional benchmarks will be published in the near future.

AMD Opteron 2356 Quad-Core "Barcelona

In the Linux benchmarks comparing the Xeon E5320 to the Opteron 2356 processors, Barcelona technology was the clear winner. However, that was to be expected. The Xeon E5320 "Clovertown" represents Intel's initial quad-core design, which has been surpassed by Intel's Harpertown. In addition, the E5320 processors are clocked at 1.83GHz, which is in starch contrast to the Opteron 2356 CPUs running at 2.30GHz. With the available hardware at hand, however, those are the results to show.

If you are interested in comparing your system's performance to the single and dual AMD Opteron 2356 configurations, install the Phoronix Test Suite for your distribution and then proceed to run phoronix-test-suite benchmark michael-30964-29321-9146. Doing so will run the same benchmarks in an identical configuration to the tests performed in this article using the Phoronix Test Suite. If you are unfamiliar with the Phoronix Test Suite, check out this article. You can also view these results on PTS Global.

When it comes to comparing four versus eight Barcelona cores, there was of course strong performance advantages most notably in the GCC compilation tests thanks to twice the number of jobs. In Nexuiz, SPECViewPerf, and the other tests, the additional processor hadn't shed any advantages but some small loses due to the software packages not being SMP-optimized. Ubuntu 8.04 LTS is using the GCC 4.2 branch, but once it upgrades against GCC 4.3 in Ubuntu 8.10 "Intrepid Ibex", there should be additional performance advantages due to the SSE4a instruction set and other optimizations.

As we have yet to test Intel's Xeon E5400 "Harpertown" processors we cannot say a winner in the Intel vs. AMD processing war for quad-core CPUs. However, with the Harpertown parts being clocked higher and other Intel advancements, benchmarks published so far on this topic show Intel taking the performance crown for both raw performance and performance-per-watt. AMD does have the benefit, however, for offering 4-way capabilities.

The only disturbance we ran into with the Opteron 2356 processors were PowerNow technology not working with Ubuntu 8.04 Beta with the Linux 2.6.24 kernel. We suspect, however, that this issue should be addressed in the near future with cpufreq.

As far as pricing goes, a single AMD Opteron 2356 will set you back $670 USD. On the Intel side, their 2.33GHz Xeon E5410 Harpertown only costs $284.99 and their 2.66GHz part will run you $500 USD.

While AMD may not be the winner this round on the server/workstation front, they are hard at work on developing their K10 successor known as Fusion. Exact details surrounding AMD's Fusion is still scare, but it will combine general CPU and GPU cores into a single processor package. This new architecture will increase the CPU performance in multi-parallel computing tasks while the modular CPU cores will continue to crunch numbers and handle the traditional tasks. The computing core codenames for the Fusion timeframe are Bulldozer, a native octal-core Sandtiger, and a low-power Bobcat. Coming up sooner on AMD's roadmap will be their Opteron quad-core refresh known as Montreal, which will feature 12MB of L3 cache.

We'll have more Linux benchmarks of the AMD Opteron 2300 processors (and Intel's Harpertown processors, hopefully) in the near future under different environments along with reviews of the Tyan Thunder n3600M and Gigabyte 3CESL v1.4 motherboards.

Haier X6 UMPC: Intel Core 2 Duo inside Arima design

Contract manufacturer Arima sure struck gold with its UM650 handtop. Because even though Haier's IDF-unveiled X6 UMPC (immortalized by gipigrl) sports a different keyboard, it still marks the fourth time that the Taiwanese unit has been rebranded.



In addition to its keyboard, the X6 strikes out on its own with a reported choice of processors: Intel's Core 2 Duo 1.83GHz L2500 and 1.66GHz L2400. Quite a departure from the 1GHz VIA C7-M tucked inside Arima's split-keypad model.

What really makes me question the processor options is that the X6 was one of the new devices showcased in conjunction with the announcement of Intel's Ultra Mobile Platform 2007. And unless it's a pick-and-choose kind of platform, UMPCs and MIDs using it are supposed to be running on the A100 or A110 processor.

Haier has apparently also gone on record with a 4- to 5-hour battery estimate and $1163 price tag.

Something just isn't right . . .

[Reg Hardware | UMPCPortal]

Technorati: arima um650, gigabyte u60, haier x6, medion md rim 1000, tango wings
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Intel's Pentium 4 3.4GHz processors

Prescott and Northwood ramp up
by Scott Wasson — 12:00 AM on March 22, 2004


BACK ON SUPERBOWL Sunday, while the world was distracted by Janet Jackson's boobie, Intel quietly introduced its new Pentium 4 "Prescott" processor. As if football and the peep show weren't enough distraction, Intel also unleashed its Pentium 4 Extreme Edition processor running at 3.4GHz, an exotic new CPU capable of putting up some mind-numbing benchmark scores.
Amid the spectacle of wardrobe malfunctions and abnormally large caches, some noteworthy developments got a little lost. For one, the new Prescott processor was a shockingly major replumbing of the familiar Pentium 4, with an uber-deep 31-stage pipeline and a host of internal tweaks. These changes made Prescott usually a little slower, clock for clock, than the previous Pentium 4. What's more, Intel was launching a pair of products, the Pentium 4 3.4GHz and 3.4'E' GHz processors, that didn't appear to exist yet. We were testing old and new Pentium 4 cores, Northwood and Prescott, at 3.2GHz, but not beyond. Only the P4 Extreme Edition was available for review at 3.4GHz.

The fact that samples weren't available to the press was a bad omen. Over the ensuing days and weeks, it became clear Prescott supplies were tight at any speed. However, about three weeks ago, Intel made good on its promise to follow up with samples of its Pentium 4 3.4GHz chips when they became available. Today, at last, we can show you how they perform.

Reintroducing Prescott
If you aren't familiar with the new Pentium 4 Prescott processor core, you really should go read our initial review of it. The changes from the older Northwood core are too complex to summarize easily. That said, I'll make a feeble attempt. Prescott includes larger caches, a much deeper main pipeline, SSE3 instructions, improved data prefetching, revised Hyper-Threading, and enough microarchitectural tweaks to kill a horse. Most importantly, Prescott is manufactured using Intel's new 90nm fabrication process, making it a smaller chip than the 130nm Northwood, despite having a much higher transistor count.



Northwood 3.4GHz (left) and Prescott 3.4GHz (right)

Test notes
Generally, the deeper we get into the technical stuff, the happier I am. However, I'm none too excited about making these articles difficult to read. So, as you peruse the following pages and glance over test results for no less than eighteen different CPUs, please keep a few things in mind.

First, Intel distinguishes the new Prescott Pentium 4 from the regular ol' Northood P4 by tacking an "E" on to the end of the name, after the clock speed. So when you're reading our graphs and see a Pentium 4 "E" processor, think Prescott. The Pentium 4 "C" you'll see here is simply a Northwood chip. It gets the "C" tag because it has an 800MHz bus, while older versions of that chip did not. (All the Pentium 4s we've tested here have an 800MHz bus.) Forgive the confusion, but we've tried to stick to Intel's naming scheme where possible, and confusion may be the natural outcome of that effort.

Next, you may recall from our original Prescott review that we actually published a complete set of benchmark results for the Northwood 3.4GHz processor way back then. We accomplished this feat by disabling the L3 cache on our Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.4GHz processor, effectively making it a Pentium 4 Northwood running at 3.4GHz. We've used the actual Northwood 3.4GHz to verify that our "simulated" Northwood 3.4GHz results were correct, but we didn't rerun every test, because we're confident our results are representative.

Finally, watch the line graphs that come after our usual bar graphs to see how each CPU type scales with clock speeds or model number increments. We will be keeping an eye on Northwood versus Prescott in particular, because that's a key issue. We're wondering whether Prescott performance gets relatively stronger as clock speeds go up, because Prescott is intended to run at high clock frequencies. In fact, it's slated to hit 4GHz or so by year's end, while Northwood will be phased out.