Going For 4GB: DDR2-1066 Kit Round-Up

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Geil Black Dragon Evo One GE24GB1066C5DC

The Black Dragon (BD) Evo One series is one of the most sophisticated DDR2 memory products you can get. It comes in a nice, beautifully designed retail box, and even the memory itself looks “different,” to say the least. The target audience is the gaming market, and Geil promises a “perfect blend of performance, high capacity and stability.” The basis of the product is two 2 GB DDR2-1066 DIMMs rated at CL5-5-5-15 timings for the 1066 speed. Geil has a 2 GB and 4 GB kit, of which we received the latter.

The memory sizes are all we can call standard, as the remaining parameters and the cooling solution are extraordinary. It all starts with a specified operating voltage of 2.2-2.4 V, which is considerably higher than the JEDEC default specification of 1.8 V for DDR2 memory. Most upper-class and enthusiast motherboards allow the user to select such a high voltage, but mainstream or low-cost motherboards may not, possibly resulting in this memory running unstably due to insufficient voltage.

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Geil equips the BD Evo One memory with its Evo One heat sink, which utilizes Geil’s so-called MTCD cooling technology. This stands for “maximized thermal conduction and dissipation,” and consists of flat aluminum heat spreaders on both sides of the memory combined with a heat pipe installed on top. The heat pipe includes a heat sink, which is responsible for dissipating heat away from the memory. If you look at the technology description on Geil’s website, you’ll see that the memory is intended to be ventilated from the side to maximize the effect of the heat spreaders.

We’re not sure how well the cooling solution actually works, as it did not provide more overclocking margin than we got with other products. We first ran the memory at its default voltage, which is specified at 2.2-2.4V, then decided to go with 2.2 V first, which did not allow us to overclock anything at all. In fact, even DDR2-1080 became unstable. Our next step was going to 2.3 V, which we applied to all memory modules in this roundup to have a reasonable voltage limit, because we want the memory to be reliable on the long run. At 2.3 V, the Black Dragon Evo One RAM went up to DDR2-1140, which is an average result.