DH Review: Corsair & Crucial DDR2 4GB KITS

craig5320

Read The Review Here
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The demand for four gigabytes of memory has risen with the release and adoption of Windows Vista amongst the enthusiast audience. Thankfully the prices have also dropped considerably since the days of XP. Vista changed the outlook for many people as it can make far better use of memory than XP, SuperFetch for example preloads the most used programs into memory for faster access. This coupled with memory prices dropping has made four gigabyte and above configurations attractive in reads to both price and performance.

onefistedboxer

Am i missing something, but im struggling to understand your conclusion. The conclusion suggests that there are "significant" increases in performance for using the dominators, that did not happen on any of the real world tests. Gaming in particular (most of the people buying these modules are gamers) saw negligible increases in performance between 2gb and 4gb, let alone between the corsair and ballistic sticks. Why would you conclude otherwise after such thorough testing on your part ? At one point the reviewer cites a 5ps increase from 2gb 800 to 4gb dominator as beneficial, an extra 2gb of dominator ram must be around £90!!, in what way could you call £90 for 5fps acceptable, that ammount in gfx card terms could get you as much as 50% in certain price segments (correct me if i'm wrong). Furthermore this is on a best case senario with vista 64, with no other bottlenecks.

The conclusion i would draw from this data is that money spent on memory is wasted in performance terms, and that it is best to get 2gb of 800mhz, and then spend your money elsewhere. I realize the importance of good memory if your overclocking your cpu, but that was not the focus of the review.

Please reply to correct me if i've been too rash.

Veridian3

We absolutely agree that the price of the Dominator sticks is an issue and that is the main reason they received an Editors Choice award rather than the Gold Award. To say that the performance increase is not as much as expected for £90 really is a personal preference though as results such as music encoding show huge benefits, 5fps in a game is not too bad either... from just a simple memory change.

In the end these sticks are much like many other components, to have the fastest/best part you need to pay the extra money. There will be those that don't like the simplicity of this and would much rather buy a cheaper alternative and overclock it to match the potential... its the same in many other market segments and the people who pay extra for pre-overclocked graphics cards when they could save cash and do it themselves. Or the people who buy high end CPUs when some midrange models are known to pass or exceed them via a small bit of overclocking.

Everyone has different requirements but when all is said and done, the Corsair sticks offer various performance increases throughout the review and it is up to the consumer to decide whether the extra cost is worth it.

onefistedboxer

Thanks for the reply, following your comments i'd like to leave a suggestion, that you review components in comparison to other upgrade options and with respect to different users.

I realize that for a simple memory change these sticks may be phenomenal, but it is easy to forget that most readers will not be reading the article from the perspective of an enthusiast and will take the review to suggest that memory upgrades are a viable root to real performance increases.

I agree completely with your final line, but i just feel this could be elaborated on for readers in the conclusion, for example you could consider the benefits of 4gb to users of 64 and 32 bit operating systems, make it clearer that you should not buy them for gaming unless you already have a high end graphics card and perhaps mention how a faster hard drive can also produce faster desktop performance.

Thanks for a reasoned reply.