Verdict: High performance but at a high price

Mushkin was one of the first manufacturers to produce high-performance, overclocking-friendly RAM.

The Redline series is Mushkin's most extreme RAM, and this Redline XP2-8000 kit is tailored to run at 1GHz at reasonably low 4 - 5 - 4 - 11 latency timings. To achieve this, however, you need to set the RAM voltage to 2.3V, which means that the modules produce a fair amount of waste heat.

As with all the PC2-8000 kits in this Labs test, we had to benchmark the Redline XP2-8000 at 889MHz in our Core 2 test rig, and 800MHz in our Athlon 64 test rig, as these are the maximum allowable memory frequencies at stock CPU speeds. Even so, thanks to the Redline XP2-8000's high bandwidth and relatively low latency timings, it performed well.

The Redline XP2-8000 has plenty of overclocking potential too, and, after increasing its voltage to 2.45V, it happily ran at 1.1GHz at its default latency timings. Dropping the timings to 6 - 6 - 6 - 18 allowed us to overclock it to 1.14GHz. You probably wouldn't want to drop the latency timings this far on an Athlon 64 system, however, as the small increase in frequency would barely provide any extra performance.

The Redline XP2-8000 upholds Mushkin's reputation for producing high-performance, highly overclockable RAM, but there are cheaper, more overclockable kits in this test.

• Cases - 21st November 2008
• Motherboards - 24th October 2008
• Gaming Headsets - 26th September 2008
• Dream PCs - 24th September 2008
• Headphones - 12th September 2008
• Media PC components - 22nd August 2008
• PSUs - 14th July 2008

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• SilverStone Raven - Peripherals
• Raptor Gaming M3 Platinum - Peripherals
• Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 - Processors
• ATI Radeon HD 4670 - Graphics cards
• DFI Lanparty JR P45-T2RS - Motherboards
• BFG GeForce GTX 260 OCX MaxCore - Graphics cards