Reply 20 of 31, by murrayman
Ordered the RAM on March 14th and got them in on April 4th, so as expected for a shipment from China, it takes a while. Threw them in the machine and got a successful post to BIOS and boot to Win10. The stock settings were 6-5-5-13 @ 800Mhz, but that proved unstable with errors in Memtest86 and Prime95 – it flat-out crashed Memtest64 in Win10 when it tried to allocate beyond 4GB. So as suggested, and inline with the one review left on eBay, I tried running them at 5-5-5-15 @ 533Mhz and got rock-solid performance on all three tests. Confirmed they are true 4GB modules each, and Memtest86 / tests in the Win10 environment confirmed successful allocation to all 16GB.
It’s a shame that the SPD is flashed the way it is, as I’m not the first one to encounter issues with the programmed timing. I feel like they would (or at least would once have) sold just fine had they been flashed as a slower-running, higher-capacity set of modules. It makes me wonder if these wouldn’t work reliably on far more motherboards / Intel systems than the few already confirmed here and in the wild, as it’s clear from posts elsewhere that some have tried this sort of RAM, encountered instability, and called it a day without playing with the timing. Then again, I'm no expert when it comes to RAM, so I may be talking out my rear and not have a clue. 😅
In any case, they’re stable on my end. Whether or not they’re worth the ~$40 going price on eBay for me is yet to be seen, based on how well they perform for my tasks – which are admittedly simple, just a bunch of heavy tabs open on Chrome (usually utilizing 10 - 12GB on my Mac). Now that I’ve got them though, if anyone would like me to play around with the settings or do other tests, etc., just let me know! I don’t mind putting them through the wringer a little to understand them better.
P3B-F 1.04, PIII 1k, 512MB PC133, GF DDR 32MB + DM3DII 12MB SLI, SB0100
P3B-F 1.03, PIII 700, 384MB PC100, V5 AGP, SB0160
CP 5170, PII 350, 256MB PC100, Rage LT 2MB, ESS 1869
PB M S610, PMMX 233, 128MB EDO66, DM3D 4MB, Aztech