The "silver" specification of Kingmax's HardCore range
is DDR 466, at CAS 3. This equates to a real speed of 233MHz, which is a very
small increase over standard DDR400 at 200MHz. This sort of speed is an achievable
overclock by even the cheapest memory. At one point, we had 333MHz Crucial running
as high as 500MHz. Because of this relatively low specification, Kingmax have
chosen not to have a heat spreader of any kind. Costing £73, it is little
more than a good quality DDR400 512MB DIMM, which typically costs around £60.
This extra cost can almost be justified by the lifetime warranty on Kingmax
RAM alone.
The module seems to be quite stable running at 200MHz CAS2, on standard voltages,
making it ideal for systems that you can't or don't want to overclock. A Front
Side Bus and memory clock of 233MHz on a Pentium 4 platform with a 3Ghz chip
would result in a 3.6GHz overclocked CPU, which is quite a respectable overclock,
especially with a Prescott. Only on an Athlon 64 platform would you find 233Mhz
memory holding you back, and then only if you have a board with PCI and AGP
locks shown on the VIA K8T800 and nVidia 250GB chipsets. Put that in context
and the Kingmax DDR466 memory is exceptionally good value for money.
