Overclocking
Now for my favorite part, overclocking!
As mentioned before, all benchmarks are affected by CPU speed, hence I am going to overclock by tightening timings rather then by raising the ram speed. Plus my CPU can’t go much higher on Uncore without my cooling the CPU down to far below zero with dry ice. That’s a bit excessive for a ram review, though I was ready to go there if I had to in order to get 2000mhz ram speeds! We have plenty of dedication here at FunkyKit.
This ram is rated at 1.55v to 1.75v, 1.75 is rather more then usual for DDR3 and brings with it a warning: Ram voltage must be kept within 0.5v of Uncore voltage. If you want to run 1.75v for the ram you have to run at least 1.25v in the Uncore. Failing to do so may cause CPU damage over the long term. In this case I was already running plenty of Uncore voltage and this was far from an issue, so I put the ram voltage up to 1.75v.
This ram tightened up nicely, better then I expected!
CPUz
2038mhz (CPUz shows the base speed, the official DDR rated speed is twice that) with timings of 8-10-9-20 is quite a bit tighter then 2000-9-11-9-27!
For the overclocking I stuck with Maxxmem, as it is the only dedicated memory benchmark that gives you a single solid number, it’s much easier to compare before and after shots with it then with other benchmarks that give you a bunch of different numbers.
Maxxmem
A bit over 7.6% faster, that’s either quite good or totally not worth it depending on how you look at things. In my mind it’s worth it, that’s a lot in the benching world.
If you were running at 1866mhz I expect it would tighten up substantially more as well, probably enough to offset the lower performance from the lower speed.
In the long term the added voltage shouldn’t cause you any issues as the ram is rated for it.
As with all overclocking you may or may not be able to replicate my settings, every kit of ram is different, as is every memory controller.
Still, the fact that this kit overclocked 38mhz above spec and then tightened up this much is a very good sign!
