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With its FlexXLC Edition memory OCZ has clad its PC2-9200 with a heatshield that fulfils a number of functions. For one thing it's made of machined polished aluminium that looks great and for another it has a series of prongs along the top edge that increase the surface area to assist cooling.

Running along the length of the module is a copper water channel with a spigot at each end so you can plumb the OCZ memory into your water cooled PC. On the face of it this is an appealing idea, but we didn't test this aspect of the memory as it seems somewhat impractical. The rat's nest of hoses can be bad enough when you water cool your CPU, chipset and graphics card so the idea of adding two modules of memory into the loop isn't very appealing.

This lack of courage means that we ran the OCZ at the same 1,056MHz as the Corsair XMS2, so theoretically we had an untapped 94MHz of memory speed left unused.

We could have run a multiplier of 2.5x to bump the speed up to 1,100MHz. However, this was strange territory for the Gigabyte motherboard as it increased the latency to such an extent that the extra 44MHz didn't yield higher performance. For that reason the performance of the OCZ was exactly the same as the Corsair XMS2, so on that basis the fancy OCZ with its smart heatsink is quite reasonably priced at £176.

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