Verdict: Competitively priced and very overclockable PC2-6400 RAM

We like the name Mushkin, mainly because it reminds us of the word munchkin, which, according to my extensive research, is either a mutated cat with extremely short legs, or a dwarf from the fictional land of Oz.

The Mushkin XP2-6400 kit is neither of the above, of course, but it's extremely fast. In contrast to the cheap and cheerful EM2-6400, the XP2-6400 is priced higher and has lower latency timings. However, it's rated as PC2-6400, so it's guaranteed to run at up to 800MHz at 2.1V at reasonably tight latency timings of 4 - 4 - 3 - 10.

As expected, the XP2-6400 performed almost identically to the EM2-6400 in our Core 2 test system, as Core 2 PCs aren't that sensitive to changes in memory latency. However, the XP2-6400 proved to be faster than the EM2-6400 in our Athlon 64 test system.

As the XP2-6400 runs at a relatively low voltage compared with some of the high-end kits in this Labs test, it has plenty of headroom in terms of overvolting. For this reason, we upped its voltage from 2.1V to 2.4V, and found that it was capable of running stably at 950MHz at its default latency timings. If you were building a Core 2 system, and therefore weren't worried about dropping the latency timings, you could overclock the XP2-6400 to 1.12GHz.

As its stock frequency, the XP2-6400 is great for Athlon 64 PCs, but provides no real benefit over the EM2-6400 in Core 2 systems. However, considering its price, it's very overclockable.

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