I’m afraid there’s no wonderful place that’s dedicated to providing advance information on memory and other itmes like that.
The closest I’ve seen so far is the Official Corsair Memory Support Forum over at the HouseOfHelp.com. It deals only with Corsair memory, but it does have Corsair personnel answering forum members’ questions.
The question, “When will Corsair come up with faster RAM?” comes up, and the answer comes down to, “When memory makers build faster memory modules.” This doesn’t appear to be happening any time soon.
Essentially, 5ns memory modules are where we are now.
Those who claim to have faster modules either require you practically electrocute them and/or have pretty relaxed timings for the claimed speed. In any event, they don’t seem to do any better than those modules using -5ns chips (and the bargain chips tend to do worse than the premium ones).
In any event, the high-end Corsairs are using Winbond BH-5 chips, and when things go well, it looks like people max out at around 220-230MHz at reasonably high memory settings.
Recently, Winbond has come out with CH-5s chips. These are 0.13 micron versions of the aforementioned 0.15 (Correction: 0.175) micron BH-5 chips. It remains to be seen if or how much better they’ll work out, or if 0.13 micron memory modules will allow for any official speed rate increases. (By the way, 5ns is the quickest Winbond module available, according to their website).
Update: CH-5s, at least currently, seem to have some real problems with low latency. They aren’t an “advance” on BH-5s, which may well explain why they’re being included in “bargain” memory sticks.
Running at 240MHz (which is what you need to do if you want to run a 2.4C at 300MHz with a 5:4 FSB:memory ratio) still looks to be a tricky mix of high voltage and relaxed memory settings.
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