PQI's PQI3200-1024DBU - Low Latency Turbo DDR400 RAM

Next, we turned our attention to overclocking the modules.  To do this, we used our Intel test bed to determine both the maximum speed of the PQI3200 at 2-2-2-5 timings as well as the maximum attainable speed regardless of timings. We locked the PCI divider to 66/33/100 in order to focus on CPU and Memory performance.  

At 2-2-2-5 we managed to increase the speed to 432MHz DDR, running the bus at 216MHz and the processor at 2.6GHz.  Next, we set the timings to 2.5-4-4-8 in order to see just how high we could go.  Our first test was to leave the bus at 200MHz and adjust the CPU:DDR ratio to 2.5, which would push the memory to 500MHz DDR, but that resulted in the system not POSTing.  However, this appeared to be an issue with the board.  When we left the ratio at 1:1, we were able to achieve an impressive 520MHz DDR by increasing the bus speed to 260MHz, running the CPU at 3.12GHz.  Not only was 520MHz an outstanding result, we suspect that we may have actually hit the limits of this motherboard since we peaked at the same 260MHz when we initially reviewed the board earlier in the year. Consequently, look at 520MHz as an impressive gain, with the possibility to go even higher.  Next, we'll run a few tests for reference to spotlight the gains achieved by the various overclocks.

Overclocked Performance with SiSoft SANDRA 2004 Pushing It Further

As you can see, with the memory clocked at 434MHz DDR, we managed a gain of 8.5% with the integer tests, increasing bandwidth by 403MB/s.  In the Floating Point tests we saw a gain of 363MB/s, equating to a 7.6% gain.  As we continued to increase the speed to 520MHz, we found gains in excess of at least 1200MB/s in each test, pushing past gains of 20% over the stock results.