Diogenes --
I often make leaping conclusions that warrant more observation before I should make them.
Even so, when confronted with a recent power-outage problem at my brother's house that caused his BIOS (and my over-clock settings on his behalf) to reset itself, I wanted to dispense with further worry about his computing practices in an upstairs room where the temperature sometimes approaches 90F. It's a g____m 15-mile drive up the hill when something goes wrong on his computer.
His Northwood 3.0C system had been configured with OCZ EL Gold DDR500 modules, and we'd run them up to DDR480 and latencies of 2.5, 4,4,7. You can't get lower latencies on those modules by dropping the clock closer to 400 Mhz, either. But I wanted to drop the clock speed and keep the performance. Looking around, I found a great bargain on some DDR400 EL Platinums using Aeneon chips and running at stock latencies of 2,2,2,5. Those modules had been proven to be good with those latencies up to 450 Mhz. Bro's birthday was coming up, too.
The bandwidth from the DDR400's @ DDR450 spanked the heck out of the benchmarks on the EL Golds running at DDR480.
So I'll be hell-bent on running FutureMark and Everest Ultimate memory benches on these Crucial Ballistix at different settings. I had them at 3,3,3,6 for 333 Mhz, and 3,4,4,8 for settings up to around 372 with the C2D and just below 360 for the C2Q. They run at 4,3,4,8 for the C2Q with 8x375. No need to run them at 400 or 500 Mhz, although I'll probably do that with settings between 4,4,4,10 and 5,5,5,15 "just to see."
What really gives me an organism is that I researched and chose these suckers deliberately, and -- well, you say it -- "I was right." I suppose the new Tracers and PC2-8500's just improve on them, so one wonders what sort of latencies you get with those running at 1:1 speeds.
If you've found any tighter latency settings than those I've mentioned -- be sure to let me know!