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When Intel officially launched its Skulltrail platform in February of this year, many enthusiasts and members of the tech press scoffed at its requirement of FB-DIMMs, or fully-buffered DDR2 memory modules. At the time, even the fastest FB-DIMMs available were rated for only 667MHz—a far cry from the 1.8GHz+ DDR3 memory available for other high-end desktop platforms. Another complaint was that Skulltrail, which consists of Intel’s D5400XS motherboard and two Core 2 Extreme QX9775 processors, officially supported memory speeds of up to 800MHz, even though 800MHz FB-DIMMs weren’t available yet.
Kingston, however, was at the ready. A few weeks after Skulltrail hit, the company launched a dual-channel 4GB DDR2 FB-DIMM kit rated for operation at 800MHz. The KVR800D2D4F5K2/4G kit comprises a pair of 2,048MB FB-DIMMs with latencies of 5-5-5 at 1.8V. Each 2GB FB-DIMM is adorned with simple, flat, black heat spreaders that were adequate, although FB-DIMMs do run relatively hot because of the advanced memory buffer that resides on every stick.
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To test the Kingston KVR800D2D4F5K2/4G kit, I installed it into a Skulltrail-powered system, equipped with a GeForce 8800 GTX and running Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit. According to SiSoft Sandra XII SP2′s memory bandwidth benchmark, the kit mustered 4.85GBps of bandwidth and 116.7fps in a low-resolution/low-quality Crysis benchmark.
Although these relatively low-clocked FB-DIMMs can’t put up the same kind of memory bandwidth scores as highend DDR2 or DDR3 desktop memory kits, they’re a perfect fit for Skulltrail-based systems.
Tags: hard disk


