Testing
Test Rig
Processor
|
Intel Core i7 920 C0 @ 2.67GHz |
Motherboard |
Asus P6T SE |
Memory |
Kingston Hyper X CL9 KHX1866C9D3T1K3/6GX 1866MHz 3x2GB |
Graphics Card |
Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 |
Hard Drive |
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 500GB |
Power Supply |
Sapphire Pure 950W |
Enclosure |
Cooler Master ATCS-840 |
OS |
Windows Vista 64-bit |
Methodology
Memory testing is the same as any other in that here at XSReviews our aim is to provide a set of clean, reliable benchmarks. For each test, the benchmark was repeated three times and then an average taken or where results were inconsistent, tests were continued until two concordant results were reached.
Our testing suite deliberately excludes any form of games testing as in our experience memory only contributes to very small performance differences and so it is our opinion that whether a particular set of memory achieves a 0.1 FPS increase over another set is fairly insignificant. Thus, the software used for testing is as follows:
- Lavalys Everest
- Sisoft Sandra
- wPrime
- 3Dmark Vantage
Tested Speeds:
- Kingston Hyper X KHX1866C9D3T1K3/6GX: 1866MHz, 9-9-9-27. 1.66V (N.B. The ASUS BIOS used only accepts voltages in multiples of 0.02V hence 1.65V was not achievable).
- OCZ Gold OCZ3G1333LV6GK: 1333MHz, 9-9-9-20, 1.66V
Unfortunately, the Kingston Hyper X memory proved to be incredibly poor at overclocking. Although boots were achieved at speeds of 1900MHz+, the stability of these clocks was very poor and upon loading Prime95 for a few minutes, the system would crash.
Even bumping the DRAM bus voltage to 1.70v and higher and dropping the timings down to CL10 didn’t aid the overclocking and a stable boot over 1866MHz simply wasn’t achievable. While I’m sure I attempted every sort of fix I could for this issue, please bare in mind that I’m no genius when it comes to overclocking, and while I do know my stuff reasonably well, user error can never be ruled out with this type of thing.
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