IT'S RARE THAT A LAUNCH of a product of older spec has a significant importance to the market. In the case of today's' announcement, OCZ managed to regenerate interest in DDR2-667.
The firm unveiled this special type of memory that complements the integrated memory controller inside Socket AM2 and AM2+ CPUs. These memory modules, named Titaniums, are first on the market to utilise the power and complexity of integrated memory controller inside K8 and K10 processors.
In case you did not know, the memory controller inside AMD's CPUs supports addressing of 11-bit columns while using 16K page size. In comparison, standard memory controllers on the market support 10-bit columns with 8K page size. In addition, AM2's controller can support as many as 2048 individual entries if a page size is 16Kbits, allowing the controller to stay longer on the same page.
This benefits apps like 3D Studio/Maya/modo for large 3D models and of course - "memory intense graphics applications" - as OCZ likes to call Adobe Photoshop for still pictures, Adobe Premiere or Sony Vegas for video processing.
Given the audience that this memory is addressing, we are not surprised that the modules are 2GB in size, for filling four DIMM slots with 8GB of memory in total. Memory clock is set at PC2-5400, or DDR2-667. We would recommend using 64-bit operating system with these modules, since AM2 memory controller after all - is optimised for 64-bit operating systems.
OCZ is first to market with these standard non-ECC memory for AMD's memory controllers and you can expect for others to follow soon. It seems to us that AMD has cooked something serious in its kitchens in Austin, Sunnyvale and Dresden.
These memory modules are not to be used on any Intel chipset, until either Intel or Nvidia incorporates memory controllers that can address modules in the above-mentioned way.