Mushkin 996587 Memory Stability Testing and Review
Special Thanks to Cris Dodd at
Mushkin Memory for providing this sample for testing!
Mushkin is a well know brand, and has been around for a very long time. Mushkin was established in 1994 by Bill Mushkin, purchased in 2000 by Ramtron International, and then finally in 2005 George Stathakis bought the company and became the new owner and president of the company. Soon after purchasing the company he sold the stock to employees and Mushkin is now a fully employee owned company
I can remember purchasing Mushkin RDRAM (
Rambus DRAM), likely not even many of you have even seen or heard of that type of memory. That's just how long Mushkin has been providing quality memory to the masses.
Mushkin has been located in Denver Colorado for the past 14 years, but has just relocated its base to Inverness, the suburban tech center south of Denver in Englewood, Colorado.
They are well know for providing "Enhanced" memory, but they also manufacturer "Value" ram, as well as various server and laptop memory, and a small lineup of modular power supplies.
I requested this set in particular to help Gigabyte and Mushkin users as I had noticed several users seem to have issues with getting this set stable here lately.
I am providing several sets of timings and voltages at various speeds for Gigabyte P35 and P45 based boards at the end of this article.
Some images of the ram and packaging (Anyone care to donate a camera
)
Mushkin uses a plastic blister packaging which protects the memory well. Various paper inserts with different Mushkin logo's are used depending on when the item was packaged and I believe what series the memory is a part of. Some European users may even get a very nice felt lined wooden box with the Mushkin Brand name and "<" logo burned into the box.
This set is from Mushkins HP Lineup, the HP lineup has Blue Frostbyte Heatsinks and is a part of Mushkin's mid-range overclocker's. The HP sets are a perfect balance between Mushkin's value memory (EM/ES) and high end (XP/Redline)
Specifications:
Mushkin HP2-6400 996587 (2x2GB)
| Frequency: | 800MHz | Latency: | 5-4-4-12 | Parity: | Unbuffered |
|
| Voltage: | 1.8V | Pins: | 240 |
| Density | > > > | Module: | 256Mx64 | Chip: | 128Mx8 |
HP2-6400 DDR2 - Mushkin Enhanced
Tests were performed for each of the following settings in these boards: Two P35 boards and one P45 board. Each passed 12 hours or more of
Memtest86+ 2.11, and each passed several hours of
HCI Design’s Memtest running dual tests within windows while the system was in use. Along with that, each setting range was thoroughly put through various benchmark programs and tests, some of which will be graphed below. The graphed results were obtained in my main system, a GA-EP45-DS4P.
You may rest assured each of the tables of settings that are provided below will be fully stable for you on the memory side of things. If you have any issues, they would likely be due to other various non- memory related settings. The settings provided are for starting stability, and not fully tweaked. The reason I requested this memory was to help user s with stability issues, so please start there.
Benchmark results are provided at three common speed ranges: 800, 900, and 1000. For simplicity in helping others I will only provide the settings used in the benchmarks. The 900Mhz results are the clear winner here Only due to the fact that they are at 1:1 and the 1000Mhz are not. I found this set of ram to be very picky using 1:1 at 1000Mhz on a P45 board (P35 not so much) and I felt providing users with results of that or settings may cause more issues then need be. They will of course do 1000Mhz at 1:1 but you may spend a bit of time getting that stable. These results are solely based on the stable settings provided for initial stability, not tweaked at all. They can however be tweaked to better then I have posted here, and by no means is the settings provided all that this Mushkin Memory may do with proper time spent.
Testing Setup:
Gigabyte P35-DS4, P35-DQ6, EP45-DS4P
Intel Xeon E3110 3.0Ghz
Mushkin DDR2 PC2-6400 Ram Model 996587 (2x2GB)
Sapphire HD3870 Toxic 512MB GDDR4
750W PSU (Don't ask
)
OS: Vista Ultimate SP1 x64
996587 2x2GB Benchmarks
Super PI Benchmarks
