A four way Quad Channel DIMM battle

Subject: Memory | January 19, 2012 - 12:23 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged: ddr3, quad channel, patriot, corsair, G.Skill, Mushkin

With the arrival of the X79 chipset we received two gifts, quad channel memory and 2133MHz DIMMs which are much easier to get to full speed.  Overclockers Club took kits from four vendors, Patriot, Corsair, G.Skill and Mushkin.  There is quite a variety of DIMMs, ranging from 1600MHz to 2400MHz at default as well as sporting a variety of timings, though all but one kit are 4x4GB.  There were some challenges when overclocking the kits and OC describes the methods they need to employ to get the most out of these DIMMs.  When the testing was done it became apparent that each of these kits was a winner, except perhaps in cost.

"The last G.Skill memory I looked at did quite well in the overclocking department and thankfully, this kit does not deviate from that path – the base speed of 2133 MHz was just the starting point for the kit. Making the jump to 2400 MHz, though, required some tweaking of the primary latencies and voltages. CAS latency was bumped to 10 with the tRCD bumped to 12 and the voltage to 1.67 V. The memory controller voltage was fine at 1.05 V with this configuration as seen by the long term (well, 7 hours at least) stability testing of the overclock. The higher speed, coupled with a decent CPU overclock, showed measurable performance gains in testing. The overclocking margin or headroom came in at 13+% or 281 MHz for the time spent tweaking the modules for maximum clocks without killing every day performance. This kit from G.Skill reached the highest overclocked speed in comparison to the other modules in this testing session."

Here are some more Memory articles from around the web:

Memory

• G.SKILL Ripjaws-Z 16GB DDR3-1600 Memory @ Benchmark Reviews
• G.Skill RipjawsZ PC3-12800 16GB @ Tweaktown
• G.Skill Ripjaws Z 2133 MHz DDR3 CL9 16 GB Kit @ techPowerUp
• DDR3 SDRAM for LGA 2011: Which Memory Is Best @ X-bit Labs