14 DAY TRIAL // In December 2006 I wrote an article regarding the speed jumps of DDR2 chips, motive for which I won't insist on the reasons that led to this rat race. I'm pretty positive about the results since DDR2 memory has scaled from an initial 200MHz mark (400 DDR) to the impressive 600 MHz (1200 DDR) making it a very successful product. INTEL was the first one to use DDR2 chips; but lately AMD has also updated the memory controller inside its Athlon 64 CPUs in order to make them compatible with DDR2 memory.
CES 2007 is already attracting a lot of attention from anyone, motive for which it's very important for the producers to show their best achievements here. And the title "the fastest DDR2" means a lot in the IT business. Even if you're talking about a high-end manufacturer, it's still a sign of power. For the last few months we have seen maybe 15 new memory models each trying to surpass the one that came before in terms of pure speed. OCZ, Corsair and Patriot are only some names in a big crowd. And after OCZ's and Kingston's modules reached 1200 MHZ, it was time for Corsair to strike back.
PC10000 (1250MHz effective) is what everyone is waiting for. At first I thought that the mark was unreachable for the next two months but as I've said, CES is not your usual battle ground. Corsair has just announced that it's unveiling the new TWIN2X2048-10000C5DF DOMINATOR memory modules at CES 2007. As it was expected, the sticks are designed to run on NVIDIA's nForce 680i SLI chipset and will probably ship by the end of the month. Regarding these modules, John Beekley, VP of Applications Engineering at Corsair claims:
"DDR2 memory performance is at its prime thank to the latest Corsair screening process and our DHX technology. Bringing production-ready PC10000 2GB kits to market ahead of the introduction of DDR3 is an exceptional achievement. The most exciting news about the release is that we will begin shipping these kits soon after the show. Consumers can benefit from the memory technology breakthrough immediately and enjoy an enhanced PC experience."
Now I don't really know when the producers will hit the ceiling with DDR2 chips but for now the race seems to be tighter than ever with DDR2-1300 just around the corner. Several rumors have suggested that Patriot might unveil some sticks capable of working stable at 1302MHz at CES but we'll have to wait another 2 days to see if it's true or not.