Overclocking
Disclaimer: Overclocking is never guaranteed, so that the results may vary depending on certain conditions and various hardware configurations. I am not recommending overclocking if you do not know what you are doing. High voltages may damage hardware, and it will not be covered by warranty.
Overclocking was tested on various motherboards. The main problems caused the four-module configuration, which didn’t want to run on some motherboards past DDR4-4000 or DDR4-4133. The two-module kit of the Viper 4 Blackout DDR4-4400, as sold by Patriot, works without issues up to at least DDR4-4733 on popular ASRock, ASUS, or MSI motherboards which are using B550, X570, or Z490 chipsets. The main difference compared to the XMP will be used voltage to pass DDR4-4600, we will need over 1.45V, while for the DDR4-4800 or higher, it will already be 1.55V. Various brands are selling Samsung B-die-based memory kits up to 1.55V, so I assume that a bit above that will be the safe limit. On the other hand, various users report that this memory IC runs fine without issues on even higher voltage, but of course, we don’t recommend setting too high voltages. The performance gain is not worth damaging the memory.
Our 2x8GB DDR4-4933 CL18-17-17-39 result required 1.57V. The memory can probably make some more, but for some reason, it couldn’t boot on one of the best motherboards for memory overclocking, which is the Crosshair VIII Impact. I guess there are more variables involved, but it doesn’t change the fact that this result is great.
The maximum memory clock with four memory modules was DDR4-4400 18-22-22 1.45V. It’s the limit of the test platform. As I said earlier, our benchmark results were pretty much the same as those at XMP settings, so this result was skipped in the comparison but is still worth mentioning. The whole 32GB required more relaxed timings to work stable, so in the end, the best performing setting was DDR4-4133 CL16-16-16 1.45V and tight sub-timings. This result performed on the ASRock B550 Extreme4 motherboard is on the screenshot above. Worth to add is the latency, which was about 60ns, while the XMP settings are about 72ns. Using four memory modules adds about 5ns.
Regardless if we decide to overclock or not, the Viper 4 Blackout will bring great results, and how much you can get highly depends on the used platform.
