Same Old Name, Whole New Flavor

If you remember a couple months, we had a look at a pair of PC3500 rated chips from OCZ's new EB lineup. OCZ has always been known for their Enhanced Latency or EL product lineup, but after testing the new Enhanced Bandwidth set many of use were left wondering EL who?

Not one to waste all of the marketing money they have put behind the EL brand name however, OCZ has released the updated EL Platinum Revision 2 line of chips. These new modules equipped with the latest post Winbond chips run at tighter timing than their predecessors which should offer a slight performance bump.

The pair of kit we'll be looking at today is officially the OCZ EL DDR PC3200 Platinum Revision 2 1GB Dual Channel Kit.

Full specs can be found here

With the new EL Rev. 2 series, OCZ (along with a host of other manufacturers) takes PC3200 down to the tightest timings available running stock at 2-2-2-6.

As with any memory review, there isn't a whole lot to talk about in terms of preliminaries. What you see is pretty much what you get. So without wasting anymore valuable time or space, lets get on to the good stuff and see how these new modules perform.

Test Setup

To put the EL Rev 2 (2-2-2-6) modules through their paces we've pitted them up against some generic Samsung PC3200 (2.5-3-3-8) chips, as well as some old school PC3200 EL (2-3-3-8) modules. For good measure we've even thrown in some PC3500 EB (Enhanced Bandwidth) (2.5-3-2-6) for good measure.

For the purposes of testing an Abit IS7-G was setup with P4 3.2E Prescott processor, an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro video card, a Maxtor 30GB ATA133, 7200rpm, 2MB HDD, and a clean install of Windows XP SP1. The latest Intel Chipset and ATI Catalyst Drivers were used. All test were run in dual channel mode with the memory bus value synchronized with the CPU.

The ES (Engineering Sample) 3.2E has multipliers available from 14x to 16x, so we were only able to keep the CPU value constant for the lower clock speeds. As we raised the FSB higher past a certain point so too did we raise the effective CPU speed.

We wanted to show you what exactly the different latency settings give you in terms of bandwidth performance and actual gaming performance. So we tested each kit at stock DDR400 (800 FSB) on a ES (Engineering Sample) Pentium 4 3.2C.

At DDR400, the CPU is running at 3.20 GHz (15 x 200)
At DDR433, the CPU is running at 3.25 GHz (15 x 217)
At DDR480, (max EL overclock) the CPU is running at 3.36 GHz (14 x 240)

In order to allow the PC3200 EL Rev 2 to reach DDR480 and above its latency values had to be loosened to 3-4-4-8. All tests were run with the IS7's max voltage setting of 2.8V which is worth noting as the PC3200 Rev 2 was able to post at DDR500 however would not remain stable throughout benchmark testing.

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