When it comes to memory one should always be as meticulous as possible, just as you would for a CPU or mainboard. Crucial, Corsair, and Mushkin are good places to start and are often times up to the same standard of quality and compatibility. However, sometimes one stick may be better than another in that one may overclock better, or another may not work properly with your system. This is especially the case with newer less proven memory technologies such as Double Data Rate (DDR).

Both Mushkin and Crucial claim to offer equally compatible and similarly configured DDR Ram modules. However, Mushkin touts their module as an overclockable unit as it has been tested a higher than specified speeds. Crucial on the other hand only can guarantee that their units will run at the specified speeds, as they don't support Overclocking.

The chips

Unlike Mushkin, Crucial actually makes the individual ram chips (micron) that they use in their modules. The DDR module Mushkin supplied us with used Hyundai chips that were made in Korea. Hyundai chips are also often times used in graphics boards such as those using Nvidia based processors.

Stability and compatibility

Stability and compatibility are the two most important items when choosing the RAM that powers one's computer. Bad RAM is a major cause of BSODs (Blue Screens of Death). What good is it if your computer is always crashing?

We used two mainboards to test both compatibility and stability. Our Iwill KA266-R rev 1.3 is powered by the ALi MaGiK 1 chipset, and our Gigabyte GA-7DXR board was powered by the AMD 760 chipset. We used these two boards with the same exact configurations, which were as follows:

CPU AMD Duron 900 MHz
128 MB of either Crucial PC2100 or Mushkin 128MB PC2100 DDR SDRAM
IBM GXP 45GB HDD (ATA/100)
Visiontek GeForce3
DVD & CD-RW Drives

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