OCZ PC2-8000 Titanium Alpha VX2

RAMming speed at a relatively excessive price.

You know you’re in for something special when your dual channel memory pair claims to need a crazy 2.3V supplied to it to reach its specs of 4-4-4-15 @ 1000MHz. Heck, the warranty even covers it up to 2.5V, so if you’ve got the motherboard flex to cover voltages that high (680i ahoy!), you can feel safe in turning up the juice knowing these things can take it, while screaming demandingly for more.

Then there’s the super slick rainbow heatspreaders it sports, reminding us of custom painted HSVs, oil slicks and just giving us a feeling of general expensiveness. Just take a look at that price up the top. Yeah, that’s what we’re talking about. Holy St Peter tricycling on the head of a leprous mime.

Whacking it into our local Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6, we set the multiplier of our X6800 to nine, the RAM to 800MHz, the voltage to the mind-blowing 2.3V and clocked up the FSB until we hit the magical 1GHz.

Nothing but rock solid, pulling a good 6689MB/s int and 6714MB/s float in SiSoft Sandra’s memory bandwidth tests. None too shabby at all.

We couldn’t push much more out of the sticks at their default times, but clocking back to SPD settings of 5-6-6-16 allowed us to reach 1100MHz, netting us some tasty results of 7020MB/s int and 7052MB/s float. Even if it does require 2.3V, it looks like we’re finally getting some real performance out of DDR2. About time!

Unfortunately although Windows was stable, whenever we restarted the machine at 1100MHz it wouldn’t boot again until we cold restarted it via button. There’s a sweet spot somewhere just under 1100MHz we reckon.

Of course the only problem with these firecrackers of joy is the price, most likely related to how difficult it is to make the things. Still, if you can get your greasy mitts on ’em (let alone be able to afford them), then you’ll likely do no better. Unless you buy the PC2-9000...