Ive been hanging out something bad to try out DDR-400 ram for some time now , esp since I have 2 very good overclocking XP1700 cpu's , my green Agoia having done 1980mhz air cooled and Prime95 stable , and my brown Agoia , Prime95 stable at 2008mhz air cooled .

With both cpu's , Ive all ways felt that I could get more as it seems that my ram is maxing out around 180mhz FSB , so finding ram that will run all the way to 200mhz FSB and possibly beyond , has been somewhat of a day dream for me.

My Samsung PC2700 DDR ram is maxing out around 182mhz FSB with both CPU's , so it makes it very difficult to see where the overclocking potential of both cpu's end , so lets see how good the Kingmax Ram is :

Kingmax 400 DDR Epox 8k3a / Maxtor 40gig ATA133 7200rpm / GF4ti4200 / C-media Sound /

To start with this ram would not boot into windows at 166FSB on my Epox 8k3a cleanly , not until I gave the ram 2 tenths extra Voltage , with 166FSB being a default bus speed , I was very surprised by this . With the ram over volted by 2 tenths , my system was stable enough to benchmark , so running SisoftSandra 2002 Mem Bandwidth Benchmark returned :

Int 2565 MB/s

Float 2406 MB/s

Compared to my Samsung ram , which returned :

Int 2542 MB/s

Float 2385 MB/s

Next I tried 3Dmark2001SE : Kingmax = 10806 3Dmarks , Samsung = 10744 3Dmarks

Pushing my FSB to 180mhz ( 1991mhz according to CPUID ) the kingmax ram needed a 4tenths of a Volt increase to run 3Dmark2001SE , Prime 95 would report and error on the first test . The Samsung ram needed a 2tenths over volt to do 3Dmark2001SE , and reported an error on the first test in Prime95 . I wasnt prepared to push more than a 4tenths of a volt extra through the Kingmax ram so this is where I stopped .

Conclusion:

Quite honestly I was very disappointed by the Kingmax ram , at no point would it run the turbo setting ( def bus speed ) , and even when set to normal it needed 2 tenths extra just to run cleanly at the default bus speed of 166mhz , the ram should not have needed any extra voltage until pushed past 200mhz FSB . And in the overclocking tests it was no better than my Samsung PC2700 ram , it did do better in the benchmarks though , its only redeeming feature . 400mhz DDR ram , well not on my system in anyway.