Overclockability Tests

Increased Voltage

A voltage boost is always a useful technique in increasing the overclockability of a DIMM. Although this DDR SDRAM DIMM is meant to use a voltage of only 2.5V, it is actually capable of running at up to 2.7V. Which is exactly what I did to test the DIMM's overclockability to the max. Let's take a look at the results :-

Wow... Look at that. Push the voltage up to 2.7V and the Crucial PC2700 DIMM surged ahead and managed to reach a stable clock speed of 406MHz with with the default CAS latency of 2.5!

However, the voltage increase did not provide much of an increase in overclockability when a CAS latency of 3 was used. Still, the maximum stable clock speed of 412MHz @ CAS 3 is no laughing matter.

It is obvious that with a little voltage increase, this PC2700 DIMM is fully capable of running at or slightly beyond 400MHz, even at default timings. Looser timings will further improve overclockability but not by a significant margin.

Unfortunately, its performance with a CAS latency of 2.0 is dismal. When set to run with a CAS latency of 2.0, this DIMM could only reach a maximum stable clock speed of 340MHz. If you want to run it at around the default clock speed but with a tighter CAS latency of 2.0, you will definitely need to boost the voltage to 2.7V.

Now, some of you might be wondering how the Crucial PC2700 DIMM will perform if timings other than the CAS latency were tighter. If you are, good! Because that's what we will be looking into next!