4GB Gets Cheap: 9 Dual-Channel Kits Compared

Features
By Thomas Soderstrom
published

Bang For The Buck

Some people will never overclock or even adjust their BIOS manually, and each of these 4 GB dual-channel kits booted at the same DDR2-800 speed and CAS 5 timings. Our preceding performance data won’t mean much to them, but the price certainly will. Here’s a sample of the before-rebate Web prices we found on Friday November 22.

If we were to only consider the retail price of these modules, two of the kits wouldn’t have qualified for today’s comparison. However, manufacturers found a sneaky way to qualify their parts, by offering substantial rebates on several products.

Anyone with the tenacity to go through a mail-in-rebate program can find huge savings available from several manufacturers. A little quick math shows the final price.

Industry watchers would have thought we were delusional had we suggested a few months ago that 4 GB of DDR2 SDRAM would be available for as little as $25 by the end of this year, yet here we are facing what could be the bottom of the DRAM market. Even Kingston’s high-priced PC2-8500 ends up under $50, while Crucial’s supremely overclockable Ballistix PC2-6400 is blessed with a $53 final cost.

Dividing performance by price is an easy way to determine value, but all of these kits required overclocking techniques to break away from the DDR2-800 CAS 5 standard. Thus, we divided the maximum stable data rate by price to define an overclocker’s value index.

Due to its exceptional after-rebate price, Corsair’s XMS2 series TWIN2X4096-6400C5 comes out a best-value in spite of its poor overclocking capability. Anyone with less faith in mail-in rebates would instead find supreme value in Patriot’s PVS24G6400LLK.

Thomas Soderstrom
Thomas Soderstrom
Thomas Soderstrom is a Senior Staff Editor at Tom's Hardware US. He tests and reviews cases, cooling, memory and motherboards.
54 Comments Comment from the forums
  • randomizer
    Good to see G.Skill finally decided to send some samples.
    Reply
  • JonnyDough
    You can increase how much ram is used for prefetch in XP as well, so that hardly says that Vista is faster than XP once you use more RAM. I for one have skipped the Vista era and am happily awaiting Windows 7. I guess I prefer to keep my $100 in my wallet for awhile instead of giving it to M$ investors.
    Reply
  • V3NOM
    i rofl'd that my cheap Team Elite owned all of them except the ballistix...
    Reply
  • JonnyDough
    Stop using rebates as qualifiers. I was taught in consumer math that if you purchase something with the cost of a rebate figured in, you had better be prepared to pay full price. I think a lot of us here IGNORE rebate pricing, and won't even support it by buying rebated items. Rebates are CRAP, no consumer likes them. They aren't a "discount" they are a marketing ploy to rip people off.
    Reply
  • raider37
    I'm pretty darn happy with my 4GB of XMS2 DDR2-800 RAM from Corsair, all my components are overclocked and work extremely well, plus here in Pakistan only 2 memory companies are widely available (Kingston and corsair) and we all know kingston is overpriced and their modules do not perform as well as Corsairs.
    Reply
  • johnbilicki
    As a regular I feel insulted that my fellow readers and I are expected to except an introduction suggesting that we are mindless consumers no different than the people who trampled and killed a worker at Walmart this past Friday.

    My dual core socket 939 with 2GB of RAM running XP Pro might not get as much FPS as my friend running a quad with 4GB and Vista but my system runs smooth on almost all the same games without dealing with all the constant freezing, errors, glitches, and horrendous boot times plus I don't have to run a page file. A real enthusiast would turn in their grave if they saw qttask in the task manager. Real pride is knowing your rig's software too and mindlessly burning money instead doing a few simple Google queries is what an amateur would do.

    I expect better than this. It does really matter.
    Reply
  • Crashman
    johnbilickiAs a regular I feel insulted that my fellow readers and I are expected to except an introduction suggesting that we are mindless consumers no different than the people who trampled and killed a worker at Walmart this past Friday.
    That sounds like the voice of experience...you were at that Wal Mart? Because it appears that everyone else automatically knew that the introduction was meant to cover the widest range of potential buyers, and not each one of them specifically. Yet you mindlessly trampled into that rant?
    Reply
  • johnbilicki
    CrashmanThat sounds like the voice of experience...you were at that Wal Mart? Because it appears that everyone else automatically knew that the introduction was meant to cover the widest range of potential buyers, and not each one of them specifically. Yet you mindlessly trampled into that rant?
    The introduction slaps everyone in the face by suggesting money is the only solution. Even less experienced people know how to do a Google query.

    "The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who haven't got it." - George Bernard Shaw
    Reply
  • Crashman
    johnbilickiThe introduction slaps everyone in the face by suggesting money is the only solution. Even less experienced people know how to do a Google query."The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who haven't got it." - George Bernard Shaw
    It suggests that very little money can be a very easy solution to multiple performance issues.

    And you're using a quote to emphasise your cynicism concerning my observation? Thanks!
    Reply
  • johnbilicki
    CrashmanIt suggests that very little money can be a very easy solution to multiple performance issues.And you're using a quote to emphasise your cynicism concerning my observation? Thanks!
    ...and entirely avoids the point of optimizing a system's software just as you have! It's an informal fallacy to suggest you have made some unique observation as I have when all you have done is avoid my point in the simple interest to convince people to spend money instead of simply preventing junk from being loaded in to their existing memory.
    Reply