Patriot PDC22 G9200ELK

Verdict: PC2-8500 kits are cheaper and more overclockable.

Patriot is just one of a handful of companies producing PC2-9200 DDR2 right now, no doubt because it's so hard to manufacture such high-frequency DIMMs.

As it's PC2-9200 RAM, the Patriot is guaranteed to run at up to 1,150MHz, 350MHz faster than the highest JEDEC standard DDR2 (800MHz PC2-6400), so it's only worth buying if you're planning on performing some serious overclocking. None of the three PC2-9200 kits has the same latency timings as any of its other family members, and the Patriot uses 5-5-5-12, which is midway between the CellShock and Mushkin kits. Like other PC2-9200 kits, it also requires a silly amount of voltage (2.3V) to work at these settings.

By increasing its input voltage to 2.4V, we succeeded in making the Patriot run stably at 1.18GHz, but this is only 30MHz faster than its guaranteed frequency. By dropping the latency timings to 6-6-6-18, it worked flawlessly at 1.2GHz, but this was easily excelled by several other kits in this Labs test, including the much cheaper OCZ PC2-8500 Reaper.

The Patriot is the cheapest PC2-9200 kit in this Labs test and has relatively low latency timings for such high-frequency RAM. However, since most PC2-8500 kits can easily overclock to the same frequency, it makes little sense to buy such premium-priced RAM.