Mushkin/Mushkin Enhanced - where they stand in the court of PC builder opinion

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RareAir23

Limp Gawd
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Sep 25, 2006
Messages
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Hi all. So tonight I bring up the topic of a memory company I've known of since around the time in my growing up that I wanted to be a PC technician/PC builder on the side. Back in the day (around 2000/2002) there rose a memory company called Mushkin. In their time of genesis and for quite a few years after they were the premier brand of memory to buy of you were a PC builder who cared about the memory they would place in their gaming rig. Their DIMMs were legendary and they didn't break the bank either.

They've outlived companies like OCZ and others. I use one of their Redline DDR3-1600 12GB kits in my current rig and have never used better memory in my tech life. Yet, with so many other PC techs Mushkin is like a forgotten brand. Nobody ever talks of their product like they did as I was learning my ways in the IT PC tech world but more importantly nobody uses Mushkin (now known as Mushkin Enhanced) in their rigs these days.

So I ask in your eyes what happened to Mushkin? Has their day already been had and others make better kits now? Are they just never in the enthusiast conversation anymore? I'd like to hear people's thoughts on this as I feel it's an interesting question to pose about such a once great PC company so highly regarded for years. Thanks and until next time I am out!
 
No idea where they are at nowadays, but I will vouch for their memory.

My current rig is 7 years old, still running one of their 2 GB sticks from the 4 GB 996599 set, those were the Mushkin Enhanced Blackline kits like this one here. The second one got fried out by a lightning strike this summer, sadly. Never had issues with the RAM and here it is 7 years later still running beautifully.

Also was fairly cheap for the time being as you mention. If they are still at the same price/performance ratio I would go with their memory again in my next build easily.
 
Last three builds all using Mushkin , all 3 have never had any memory issues.
Oldest build just went over 8 years recently.

I find it odd that Asus does not even bother to qualify their memory.
 
Mushkin made their reputation back when RAM speeds were awful by today's standards. A lot of the various ram sticks out in the sdram and ddr1 days were bought already assembled from the OEMs and rebranded so that a majority of the consumer sticks were using the same/very similar pcbs and chips that were binned only as far as making their design specs.

Mushkin came along with their own pcbs for their sticks and dedicated chip binning that catered to a very specific market. This was back when getting 5 more Mhz out of your ram actually made a noticeable difference, especially if you were FSB overclocking and had no ram divider options. Even in the early days of DDR, being able to drop your CAS timing for example would actually show speed improvements in everyday tasks and gaming, not just benchmarks. Mushkin built a rep for making damn good memory that performed well when you wanted to push things.

Now memory technology has advanced, and there's no real need for the specialty RAM business Mushkin started with as the retail RAM available now covers the full gamut of timings/speed options and those minute improvements from special binning and such don't really show any results outside of benchmarks these days and most of the hardcore benchers will buy multiple sticks of RAM to bin them out themselves.

They still make good ram as far as I know though.
 
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