Winchip DDR2 667 MHz 16 GB Quad Kit

[sulaimankhan]

I would like to thank Winchip for providing the review sample. The firm is well known in Asia and is now entering the European market as well.

Winchip was founded in 1995 and has been a large player in the asian OEM market from the beginning. They have been pushing their retail offerings quite successful, with unique DDR2 and now DDR3 memory. The next goal of Winchip is to gain share on the European market with their retail products. They made some waves with their 1200 MHz DDR2 memory in combination with a large array of various heatspreaders as well as being one of the first to offer DDR3 for the retail market.

Today we get to look at another very unique offering from Winchip. A 16 GB DDR2 Kit. It is made up of 4x 4 GB DIMMs each running at 667 MHz CL5-5-5-15. This may not seem like much, but the large capacity is the more important factor with such a kit.

Winchip is also looking for a distributor in Europe to break into the market. This first step is usually a very tough one and once they do, the new brand name will still have to establish itself in Europe. All this takes quite some time.



Test Setup
Test System
CPU: Intel E6300 Conroe
1.86 GHz, 2 MB Cache
Motherboard: Asus P5KC Intel P35C, BIOS 1001
Video Card: PowerColor X800XL Pro 16 PCI-E
Harddisk: Samsung P80 80 GB
Power Supply: Ultra V-Power 450W
Software: Windows XP SP2, Catalyst 8.3

As you can see an ASUS P5KC was used for this review. Due to the high density kit, not every modern mainboard like the P/X 30 or P/X 40 Series board will work with the memory. Trying to boot the full 16 GB on a MSI P35 Neo2-FR at the rated speed of 667 MHz was simply not possible, even with the newest bios. Winchip is currently testing various mainboards and the ASUS P35 and P35C as well as X38 boards have passed these tests.

Performance & Overclocking
We usually concentrate our memory reviews on the overclockability of the DIMMs. Considering that the Winchip 16 GB kit is already pushing the envelope on what is possible with non-ECC memory on mainstream motherboards, you should not expect any overclockability in this case. Such high densities can usually only be found in the workstation or server segment, with ECC equipped memory or FB-DIMMs.

Nonetheless we tried pushing the Winchip memory to its limits using all 4 DIMMs in a 16 GB configuration and running just two of them for a total of 8GB in dual channel. Using all four DIMMs at the default 1.8V, the memory only managed to budge up to 677 MHz and that did not change at 2.2V or even 2.4V.

Winchip also offers the same memory in a 2 x 4 GB configuration, thus this was the next step. Using just two of the 4 GB DIMMs, the memory manages a bit more, hitting the wall at 716 MHz at CL5-5-5-15 and 2.4V. Considering these results, we will not focus on benchmark results in this area, as the main purpose of such a kit certainly does not lie in pure speed/performance but other areas.

A new scenario with such memory would be the use of a Ramdrive. This can easily be done with various programs, freely available on the Internet. The Gavotta Ramdisk adds a GUI to the ramdisk capability already present in Windows XP. With this program we are able to allocate the 12.7 GB which Window 32Bit cannot access in form of a vitrual drive, which is always present in Windows.

Due to the nature of the memory, all the contents of the ramdrive are lost, when the PC is turned off or restarted. This means that the virtual drive should only be used to store temorary files. You may use the drive for the windows pagefile or as give programs like Photoshop direct access to it.

Futuremark PCMark05
To give you some numbers on performance of the Ramdrive when compared to a system drive, we used PCMark05. Besides the default benchmarks, the HDD suite was selected as well.

Hard Drive RamDrive
Samsung P80 80GB 7200RPM 8MB Cache SATA
12.7GB Winchip DDR2 667 MHz CL5 Ramdrive
PCMark 05 Score 4917 8970
HDD - XP Startup 7.9 MB/s 296.0 MB/s
HDD - Application Loading 6.5 MB/s 255.4 MB/s
HDD - General Usage 5.3 MB/s 189.8 MB/s
HDD - Virus Scan 78.7 MB/s 2158.2 MB/s
HDD - File Write 58.1 MB/s 1663.5 MB/s
Physics and 3D 169.5 FPS 165.5 FPS
3D- Pixel Shader 114.9 FPS 114.1 FPS
Web Page Rendering 3.3 Pages/s 3.3 Pages/s
File Decryption 51.7 MB/s 51.7 MB/s
Graphics Memory 1139.9 FPS 1126.9 FPS
Audio Compression 1944.9 KB/s 1851.4 KB/s
Video Encoding 341.7 KB/s 355.9 KB/s
Text Edit 134.3 Pages/s 134.4 Pages/s
Image Decompression 26.5 MPixel/s 26.5 MPixel/s
File Compression 4.3 MB/s 4.3 MB/s
File Encryption 26.5 MB/s 26.3 MB/s
Memory Latency 8.0 MAccesses/s 8.1 MAccess/s

Photoshop Performance
To test the performance between a traditional setup and one using the 12.7 GB ramdrive using Photoshop can easily be done with the Driverheaven actions. They have created a list of filters which are applied to a 700 MB JPG image and the time for each filter is displayed after it has been applied. First the scratch disk of Photoshop was placed on C:, then it was switched to the ramdrive