Memory memory on the wall, who’s the fastest of them all?

Today we take a quick look at one of the famous Mushkin “Special” series sticks. Although they are no longer available from your local retailer, you might encounter enthusiasts selling them off at Ebay or your local forum.

The Mushkin “Special” series is based on the now extinct Winbond BH-6 memory chip, they offer extremely low timings, when booting up with SPD set they’ll select CL2 2-2-5 by default!

But are low timings really “the end”? They offer an increase in performance, or so I’m told, so let’s see how they match up against some more recent Corsair XMS PC3200LL Pro.

The Special Series

Tom from Factor provided 2 of these Special sticks:



Now here’s the catch: they are not matching in size, ay :-(!



So all tests will be done in Single Channel! Expect a lesser overclock when running 2 sticks in your system instead of one.


Time to meet the competition



At the top the Corsair XMS PC3200LL Pro featuring those flashy LEDs, at the bottom a 256Mb PC3200 XMS memory I found which actually comes equipped with BH-6!

To start of, due to the mix-up with the memory sizes you’ll see a small performance difference in gaming benchmarks, pure memory related benchmarks however don’t show this.

But I’m running ahead of myself, onto the first round of testing on my trusty Intel setup ->