It wasn’t that long ago when people were talking about PC66 vs PC100 RAM. Then there was PC133, and everyone thought that was fast! Next, we entered the world of Double-Data Rate RAM (DDR RAM) and started seeing specifications such as PC2100, PC2700, and so on. Several months ago we took a good hard look at some top of the line RAM from Corsair, called XMS3500C2. It ran at PC3500 speeds, or the equivalent of 217mhz FSB using timings as low as 2-2-2-5. And we were impressed.

Fast forward a few months and Dual Channel DDR has become the rage for high performance motherboards. To make sure you can take full advantage of this, all the major memory manufacturers are offering “kits” with “matched pairs" of memory. Why is this important? Simply put, Dual Channel DDR, which is supported in all Intel chipsets after the E7205 (Granite Bay) as well as any current AMD chipset allows the CPU to access 2 data paths to the memory at the same time. In order for this to work optimally, the two sticks of RAM have to be as closely matched as possible.

Here we are in September 2003 and we have Dual Channel kits in speeds ranging from PC3200 to PC4000 and higher from a variety of vendors. Today we will be taking a look at the TwinX1024-4000 from Corsair which is 2 sticks of 512mb CMX4000 RAM.