To see if there were any differences in the \”quality of performance\” between the two companies memory modules, I ran SiSoft Sandra\’s Memory Benchmark on all modules at the same front side bus speeds to ensure fairness. All tests were performed after a clean boot with no other programs running in the background. Below are some of the screens of these tests:

Mushkin Rev.2 256MB PC133 CL2 @133 FSB
See Results

Crucial 256MB PC133 CL2 @133 FSB
See Results

(2) Crucial 128MB PC133 CL2 @133FSB
See Results

As you can see, there were no measurable differences between the 3 as far as this bench was concerned. All 3 modules performed at the same level and honestly, this didn\’t come as a surprise.

After running 3DMark2001 on all three modules at 133MHz FSB setting (800MHz) I was startled by one of my findings. The benchmark ran well on the Mushkin module scoring 2958 overall, and on the 2 sticks of Crucial 128MB at 133MHz FSB (scoring 2955), but with the single stick of Crucial 256MB  3DMark2001 would not run. It would initialize, then allow me to choose the options for the benchmark, then after clicking the \”benchmark\” button I would either get a crash back to the desktop, or a black screen which would force me to reset the system. I tried to remedy this by switching back to CL3 in the BIOS but this did not fix the problem. I also reseated the module twice, lowered the FSB setting all the way to the 100MHz mark, and tried using a different memory slot to no avail.

Just for good measure I ran a few Quake 2 timedemos using the \”crusher\” timedemo. Here is a chart comparing frames per second with all 3 memory configurations. Not surprisingly, all three configurations provided similar results.

See Quake 2 Crusher Benchmark Results

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