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Our final batch of memory is OCZ DDR3-1333, which costs an epic £352 for 2GB. Despite the high price, the two heatshields look rather tacky. They're shiny, perforated with a series of small holes and carry the Z logo but honestly, they look rubbish compared to the stunning Reaper modules.

We're talking about serious money here so we're going to give the OCZ an extended test starting with a run on the Gigabyte at the standard FSB of 333MHz. On Auto settings in the BIOS the OCZ DDR3 ran at 1,066MHz instead of 1,333MHz, so we manually set the memory speed to 1,333MHz, which increased the latency figures to 9.0-9-9-25 and then we ran our benchmarks.

It's informative to compare the OCZ DDR3-1333 with the PNY DDR2-800 on standard FSB as the overall performance in PCMark05 is identical. The memory element of PCMark05 leaps forward with the faster OCZ and so too does bandwidth in SiSoft Sandra but overall performance is unchanged. In real life, instead of a synthetic benchmark, you do notice an increased urgency when the faster memory is running but it's a marginal improvement and broadly speaking we feel that the overall PCMark05 score reflects system performance accurately.

Increasing the FSB to 440MHz pushed the memory to 1,408MHz and the latency figures hit 10.0-10-10-27 and while the memory bandwidth was the fastest that we had seen to date at 7.8GB/second, overall system performance wasn't significantly better than a decent batch of DDR2.

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