A topic that comes up more often than any other in our forums seems to be “What brand or type of memory should I use for my system?” The answers can be quite varied depending on what type system the user is running, i.e. AMD or Intel, whether or not the user is planning on overclocking like there's no tomorrow and each users own personal experiences with various memory manufacturers. If you've been a longtime GruntvillE reader or just recently found us on the web and have been catching up on our reviews, you'll know that Corsair has been a longtime favorite of ours, continually taking the King of the Hill title time and time again. But does that mean that they're the only game in town when it comes to high performance memory? Not by any stretch of the imagination; there's plenty of competition from a variety of sources, including GeIL , Kingston , Mushkin , PMI , and many others, all vying for your attention, and naturally, your purchasing dollars.

Today we'll be looking at the Ultra Platinum PC4400 Dual Channel DDR Kit from GeIL. These bad boys come equipped with hand picked 3.5ns 32x8 DDR chips, donned with very sexy platinum copper heat spreaders, and topped with a temperature thermometer to allow for monitoring of the operating temperatures. GeIL, a relative newcomer to the market, began their manufacturing in 1997. They gained sudden notoriety with the release of their GL2000 and “Golden” branded series of modules in 1999, and quickly became a common name to those shopping for high performance memory. Fast forward a few years to 2004 and now we have processors like the Intel P4 2.4c that just can't seem to get enough speed; continually used time and again to see just how far a particular rated brand of memory can be stretched, seemingly able to sweat out even the fiercest of competition.

So what kind of performance will these modules provide and how do they stack against our current KotH favorite from Corsair? Will they be held back from their full potential because of the CPU or will they be the one doing the retraining? Read on as we find out.