I'm sure that not many of you have heard of Centon. Centon is actually a large memory manufacturer just like Kingston and has been around for a very long time. They've been quiet mainly because they haven't stepped up into the enthusiast crowd. Now that they have, they're coming out with a big bang. Centon's offering today is their Gemini Low Latency DDR2. The memory is rated to run 266MHz, PC2-4200, with latencies of 3-2-2-5. That's right you didn't read it wrong.
This is the lowest latency memory contender in the DDR2 roundup. The memory also is programmed to run at 3-2-2-5 latencies. There is no need to manually adjust as the motherboard will automatically do it for you. The memory comes single sided and is quite obvious as the heatspreaders only cover one side of the module. Centon really needs to work on their physical appeals as the heatspreaders are extremely bland. At least provide heatspreaders to both sides so that the look is more balanced. But of course, aesthetics is not something that brings down the overall score.
Centon's PC2-4200 was certainly a pleasure to overclock with. Running low latencies of 3-2-2-5 at 266MHz is the key to making DDR2 better than low latency DDR. During overclocking, I kept the low latencies of 3-2-2-5 and pushed it all the way to PC2-5400 speeds. That's running the memory at 337MHz with latencies of 3-2-2-5! The downside is that 2.0v was required to run such low latencies and high speeds. I pushed further and found the memory to be capable of running 354MHz with latencies of 4-3-3-10 and 2.0v. This is definitely some impressive overclocking memory.
- 266MHz 3-2-2-5
- 337MHz 3-2-2-5
- 354MHz 4-3-3-12
