The XP2-6400 memory is of very good design and quality. The black aluminium heatspreaders help heat dissipation while also allowing for better ventilation making for a more stable performance. This modules are very impressive when installed on any motherboard and they enhance the look of any system.

The performance depends on the settings, of course. We highly recommend setting the memory to its certified speed and timings, 800MHz and 4-4-3-10 respectively. Under SPD, the speed is 667MHz and CL 5-5-5-13. Why get 800MHz certified memory modules if you are going run them at 667MHz?

The overall performance at 800MHz/4-4-3-10 is good, but at 930/4-4-3-10 is absolutely great. In fact, with SiSoft Sandra 2005, the Mushkin XP2-6400 memory produced great scores of 7787MB/s and 7763MB/s in the Memory Bandwidth benchmarks, for the Floating Point and Integer maths benchmarks respectively. While in the Combined Index, the reported 13858MB/s is great also. In PCMar05, the 5856 PCMarks is an excellent score. The performance gets even better when the memory is set to 1050MHz. In this case, the Memory Bandwidth benchmarks increased up to 7926MB/s and 7909MB/s, while for the Combined Index, up to 14044MB/s, and finally PCMark05 went up to 5954.

In games, the recommended setting produced very good framerates, but again, increased memory speed in combination with an overclocked CPU will increase the framerate even more, where this is possible of course, since keep in mind that graphics is something that is highly dependent on the graphics card.

At the time of this review, the price for the XP2-6400 2x512MB was US$180, according to Mushkin. A very good price in combination with great performance and a lifetime warranty, makes this product a great buy.