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The second contender is 2GB of TwinMOS PC2-6400, which sells for a miniscule £31. This is very cheap as most 2GB kits cost about £70 and once again it's a basic module, but this time we have 16 chips on each module with eight on each side. There is no heat spreader.

Our test PC would start Windows with a FSB of 440MHz but couldn't manage the 450MHz we saw with the PNY memory. This gave a CPU speed of 3.52GHz, which is barely slower than the 3.60GHz in the previous run, so we expected similar results. However we hit a problem along the way.

Once again we used the lowest memory multiplier in the Gigabyte Bios of 2.0x so the memory ran at 880MHz instead of its rated speed of 800MHz. When we ran PCMark05 it froze half way through so we re-ran the test with a fan pointing at the memory and all was well, though the performance results were a couple of percent less than the PNY which reflects the lower FSB.

The PNY memory is an incredibly cheap upgrade if you want to overclock your Core 2 Duo by a moderate amount but you can expect that it will become the main limitation on speed.

Put it this way; we don't mind using an extra fan to cool memory on a test rig but would you trust your email and work files to memory that is clearly on the verge of melt-down?

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