What's wrong here?

[unhappy_mage]

I've been disappointed with my laptop's speed since I got it. It's a Dell Latitude D400 few years old, and it has an Intel 855 chipset. There are two 256MB sticks in it. Today I ran Memtest on it, and it reported that the memory was clocked at DDR 266 (sounds right) and was transferring 279 MB/s (wait, what?!).

What's going on here? Is there a program I could run (preferably under Linux) that would let me confirm or deny that the transfer rate is so low?

 

[mavalpha]

MemTest will always report unbelievably low bandwidth; I'm not sure if it's because it's unoptimized, unbuffered, or what other reason it might be, but take its bandwidth results with a grain of salt. I've seen 1GB/s transfers with dual-channel DDR2, and the highest I think I've ever seen was around 3GB/s. You'll be better off running Lavalys' Everest in Windows. Unfortunately, I'm not sure what Linux counterparts exist.

Edit:
Just a guess, but you could trying building from Byte Magazine's BYTEMark source code... It's outdated, but I don't see why it wouldn't work...

Edit2:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=2427116
I was going to suggest running Everest in Wine, and found this post. Apparently Sisoft's Sandra does work under it.

 

[unhappy_mage]

I used 'dd' to read from memory while in Linux; it reported similarly low performance, but there could be double-buffering going on there. Perhaps if I get time I'll install Windows on it for testing purposes.

Does anyone have an 855-based machine that they could post figures for?

Edit: Thanks, I will try Sandra.