Introduction

OCZ have been producing very high quality performance ram since the early days of 1997. Their products not only include DDR1 and DDR2 ram, but also a range of PSUs and now cooling products. In our previous OCZ review, we looked at their Platinum DDR2 PC2-8000 1Gb Kit (2x512Mb) with their patented XTC heat spreaders and low 4-5-4-15 memory timings. It was a very good product and competed very well against Corsair's XMS2 PC2-8500 1Gb kit.

Since ATI have merged with AMD, manufacturers are now starting to fully exploit the combined technologies of ATI's Crossfire and Xpress 3200 chipset, inconjuction with AMD's AM2 processors with DDR2 ram. One of the first manufacturers to take advantage of this is OCZ technology. They've been working closely with both AMD and ATI, and now they've managed to get their ATI certification on one of their memory products.

In this review, we will be looking at the OCZ ATI Certified PC2-6400 DDR2 memory 2Gb kit. The kit comprises of 2 x 1Gb modules and comes with their patented XTC heat spreaders for extra cooling and also enhanced memory timings of 4-4-4-15. These modules are only one of a very few products that is fully ATI certified, for use in Crossfire enabled gaming systems. So what does all this mean? Well, being ATI certified, you are guarranteed (as far as we know) that these modules will offer the best in terms of compatibility and performance, when used with most ATI Crossfire enabled system.

When I first heard about DDR2 memory, I was pretty confused how they class and labelled them. OK, I'll try and give you some DDR2 terminology ...

• PC2-4200 : DDR2-533 : 133FSB : 266Mhz
• PC2-5300 : DDR2-667 : 166FSB : 333Mhz
• PC2-6400 : DDR2-800 : 200FSB : 400Mhz
• PC2-8000 : DDR2-1000 : 250FSB : 500Mhz
• PC2-8500 : DDR2-1066 : 266FSB : 533Mhz
• PC2-10000 : DDR2-1200 : 300FSB : 600Mhz

Will we see a war between the two technology standards in the near future? ... ATI Crossfire (vs) Nvidia SLI-ready. Mmmm ... we'll have to wait and see. Nvidia have already implemented their SLI-ready program for some time now. Computer products such as memory modules, PSUs, graphic cards and motherboards, all have to match certain criteria to be SLI-ready. Generally, SLI-ready systems are Nvidia based, using dual graphics cards and motherboards which are all Nvidia based.

I've done some preliminary tests already and I can tell you that being ATI Certified ... does make a difference and can really increase performance. We used a full ATI setup. This included an Asus M2R32-MVP motherboard based on ATI's Xpress 3200 chipset (RD580), Asus EAX1950 Pro and of course the OCZ ATI Certified PC2-6400 DDR2 memory 2Gb kit.

OK, now let's not waste any more time ... and see how well these OCZ ATI Certified PC2-6400 DDR2 memory 2Gb kit can really perform.

Let's take a look at the specifications ...