In the box



Well looking at the box, I can say that some thought was definitely put into the OCZ Booster. A nice large two led display graces the left side of the unit promising those of us not in our first two decades of life a chance to read the outputs without risking our nose hairs in the CPU heatsink attempting to get close enough for a gander. The right side of the module is devoted to transforming electronics and adjustment knob. Two molex connector ports are on the top of the PCB and are color keyed.



Opening the box, things become a little clearer on how the piece is going to install. As a fully fledged member of the XY chromosome club, e.g. a male of the species, I decided to skip the instructions and head straight for the installation. I must admit, even though I'm fairly tech savvy, my mom could probably install this without looking at the instructions. For the anal retentive, a quick glance may be needed, but OCZ has definitely worked long and hard to come up with a design that is easy to use and install.


Installation:

Installation is very straight forward in most respects. The OCZ booster installs in a spare DIMM slot and somehow adds vdimm to your ram modules, how much depends on where you set the dial on the unit. Plug in the bridge cable between your ATX power supply and your motherboard, and the 2 color coded cables to the booster itself and simply plug the booster into an available ram slot.



This is where things can and do get tricky though. Some motherboards may not have enough clearance for the components on the Booster to clear the DIMMs present in the slots of the motherboard.



OCZ is kind enough to keep a fairly current list of motherboards both mechanically and electronically compatible with the OCZ Booster, so if you’re concerned about your components interacting please check their website listing here.

As you can see in the photo above, the Voltage dial comes into contact with the heatspreader of then #2 DIMM on the MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum. While not of importance on this board as everything still fit ok, some boards will not allow either the booster or ram module to co-exist due to proximity.

Onto the testing ->