Recently we were contacted by Mushkin, who informed us about a new series memory products that was in the offing. This series of products called the Ascent, would be offered both in DDR2 and DDR3, have both 2 and 4GB kits, and offer varying increases in performance over their previous product high-performance product line. Today it is our pleasure to share our findings for Mushkin's 4GB Mushkin XP2-8500 Ascent DDR2 memory kit. We should also note that the official launch for Mushkin's Ascent memory series should take be taking place and be available most major vendors as you read this review.