OCZ Warranty Return...got slower ram?

Hi, I'm not familiar enough to know if this is a valid complaint but I just returned 4 gigs of OZC EL PC-5400 Gold edition to OCZ on a warranty return. Well I got the new ones in today and noticed a difference.



First is the heat spreader. The ones I had (3 months old maybe) are solid gold, the new ones have holes in them. Not a big deal as I heard this is an improvement depending on your system, but some of you may recognize that.



The main difference is in the label that's on the modules. My old ones said:



"Gold Edition"

"4-4-4-8"



The new ones are



"Gold Edition GX XTC"

"4-4-4-12"



As I understand it the difference between the 8 and 12 is going to mean slower performance. True or am I paranoid? These are plugged into a P5N32-SLI Deluxe mobo with the 955 3.47ghz dual-core extreme edition.



Thanks for any help.

That is a difference, they must have given you a lower model.

I would contact them if you turned in 4-4-4-8 and got 4-4-4-12 that sounds like a mix up to me and they sent you the wrong ones in return.

Nah, that 12us is nothing. I wouldn't worry about it. They gave you a higher end model, the Gamer Extreme edition. They did that for me too when my old RAM kicked the bucket.

4-4-4-8 is better than 4-4-4-12, so they gave a lower model. And usually the warranty clearly states that they will only give you the same product or a better one.

Ummm. I suggest you go to the OCZ website and do a little research. lol I'll bet you don't even know what the 8 and the 12 are for.



http://www.ocztechnology.com/product...ce/gold_series

Sounds like they stopped producing your model, so they replaced it with the closest one. The tRAS wont make a huge difference. The biggest performance change comes from CAS.



Here's what looks like you old RAM, although OCZ claims it has 4-4-4-12 timings: http://www.ocztechnology.com/product...d_dual_channel



And heres what they replaced it with: http://www.ocztechnology.com/product...00_gold_gx_xtc



The biggest difference seems to be that the EL is warrentied up to 2.2 V, while the GX isn't (I think the GX lines isn't meant for overclocking as high as EL)

Thanks for the replies so far. It seems some people are on the fence about if this is really a sizable difference. It's a bit of a procedure to do a return so if we're talking overall performance change of less than 1% I'll probably just keep them. However, I do a lot of memory intensive projects so if this is a difference that will show up significantly I'll exchange them.



Luckily I did have a benchmark between the two. The initial benchmarks were made with an unknown version of Sandra 2005. The fact that it's an unknown version may throw out this comparison but with the old ram I got:

Int Buff'd iSSE2 5883 MB/s

Float Buff'd iSSE2 5890 MB/s



And using Sandra 2005 SR3 10.69 with the new ram I got:

Int Buff'd iSSE2 5804 MB/s

Float Buff'd iSSE2 5814 MB/s



Differences- Int = 1.4%, Float = 1.3%



But of course benchmarks aren't real world so....Any thoughts?



I noticed in the two links they made a point to mention the 2.2v bit in the features on the left side, but both have EVP which means they both carry the same 2.2v +-5% warranty. I spoke with the lead OCZ tech and he said with 4 gigs I should be running 1.9-2v anyway. At the moment I'm at 1.95v.

4-4-4-8 doesnt sound right... 3-3-3-8 sounds more common, and 4-4-4-12 sounds more common. can you link us to the original product that you bought?

No because the place I got them doesn't seem to sell them anymore (tigerdirect). I can do ya one better though, here's a pic:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v6...ay2003/ram.jpg



The part number is in there. It differs from the ones I have now. Rare? If so, "ON SALE NOW, ONLY $499.99!" haha.



Ok interesting bit of testing. I removed one of the modules more-or-less because I'm bored and had a hunch. So running 3 gigs I ran a memory test with the same Sandra 2007 as got Int's of 53xx MB/s with some dropping to 47xx MB/s. Quite a drop from the test above. Doesn't really matter to this thread, but just curious if that was common. I'm thinking it's because I had two modules on one channel and only one on the other. If that's the case it would seem if you want absolutely top performance don't use 3 gig, use 2 or 4. Maybe I'm crazy.



So more testing came along. I updated my BIOS since it was pretty old, plugged the 4th stick back in and retested. This time I got:



Int Buff'd iSSE2 5966 MB/s

Float Buff'd iSSE2 5916 MB/s



And a second test got:



Int Buff'd iSSE2 5844 MB/s

Float Buff'd iSSE2 5836 MB/s



So they're floating right around the benchmarks with the "old" ram. I'm thinking there isn't much of a difference here.