Super Nade,
Thank you very much for reading the memory PCB article and posting your thoughts on our article. In the end Legit Reviews strives to bring new issues to light and make people think about. Let me start out by talking on some of the comments you made.
“I believe BP is used because it's cheaper, not better.” –SN
You hit the nail dead on with this statement and I pointed that out here: “...Brain Power PCB's are one third the cost of the reference design PCB's. The Brain Power PCB is shorter than the reference design, thereby reducing height issues on custom/special applications. They also require fewer components, thus lowering cost and making it faster to build since it needs less time on the assembly line.”
“Their PCB's are supposed to overclock better than the JEDEC PCB's. Apart from one sketchy write-up by legit reviews, I see no more proof.”
Hum.. Harsh man! Our article is far from sketchy and before our article was posted we did a TON of in-depth testing to verify our results. The article started out as a 6-way PC-3200 TCCD memory shoot out, but during testing it was clear that performance was identical during testing. That didn’t make for an interesting article. I then went on and overclocked our test samples. I then found the max overclock with the RST Pro2 card and a day later when I was plugging data into graphs I noticed that some stood out. This was odd to me so I re-ran the tests with multiple samples. I actually had 5 sets of Corsair XMS XL and 3 sets of the OCZ/PQI memory that I was sent and that I purchased off Newegg. All of the memory kits showed identical results.
Trying to figure out what the difference was I noted the PCB differences. I then called the memory companies to confirm what I was seeing on the test bench. They called me back the next day (they being Corsair & Kingston) and confirmed my results. They also went a step further and switched IC’s. From the BP PCB to the JEDEC PB and vice versa. If the difference in performance was in the IC then testing would have shown this change. Just in case you are wondering about the SPD timings, both were SPD programmed to be identical.
After we found the differences and they were confirmed by many memory companies we went ahead and published our article. Just before we published the article Corsair informed us that they changed over to the BP PCB on their XL part to make it faster. A couple weeks later the released the PC-4400C25, which could only be reached in mass on the BP PCB. Numerous other companies jumped onto the bandwagon since performance went up and cost went down. You stated that that you see "no more proof" to back up our findings. The proof is in the memory that is now for sale in the market. Multiple companies launched new parts thanks to the BP PCB's being found to perform better.
As you can tell our article was not sketchy, and we were one of the first to catch on to the performance factor involved in Brain Power PCB’s. Hopefully know you will understand what goes on behind an article that we write. It isn’t just something we write up in an hour and be done with. This article took weeks to complete from our first discovery to the date it was published. After it was published I received phone calls from OCZ, Corsair, Kingston, PQI, Mushkin, Kingmax, and others confirming the findings and thanking us.
As for other IC’s performance on BP versus JEDEC PCB’s… I couldn’t honestly tell you because other than UTT IC’s no other good enthusiast parts are on the market. Did you read our UTT article?
Let me know if you have any other questions!
Nathan Kirsch
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