A Closer Look
The OCZ Platinum DDR3-1600 Low Voltage 4GB kit sports OCZ’s beautifully platinum plated XTC Z3 heatspreaders. The XTC heatspreaders are designed to allow airflow in and around the heatspreaders and around the memory chips for enhanced cooling. The platinum heatspreaders are so shiny that I in the past I have had problems photographing them, but for some reason the last couple of sets I’ve had turned out pretty well.
The memory is tested to run DDR3-1600 with timings of 7-7-7-24, with Intel’s required 1.65v. The memory is optimized to run on Intel P55, H55, and H57 motherboards. There are numerous low voltage 4GB kits out there, but once you narrow your search to DDR3-1600 or better with timings of 7-7-7 or better, the list gets pretty small.
Installation
Test Rig:
Intel Core i7 870 LGA 1156 processor
Asus P7P55D-E Pro motherboard
Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 video card
OCZ Z Series 650 watt power supply
Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus CPU cooler
Ikonik Zaria Midtower
Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit
Installation amounts to popping the modules into the proper memory slots. For those unfamiliar with Intel P55 (and X58) motherboards, the proper slots are the slot closest to the forward edge of the motherboard, and the second slot closest to the CPU. These are the opposite slots used in LGA 775 Intel motherboards, and can cause some confusion. So far, every P55 and X58 board I’ve seen has the proper memory slots in a lighter color than the other slots.
If you are using all four memory slots, I highly recommend using only 1 pair of modules when starting the rig for the first time.
As with all high performance memory, the OCZ Platinum boots at a lower speed than the advertised one. The reason for this is if there are issues with BIOS settings that would prevent the system from POSTing, such as the need to overclock the CPU, the system will still start. The BIOS booted the memory at DDR3-1333 9-8-8. So I went into the BIOS and changed the memory settings to DDR3-1600 8-8-8-24 at 1.65v.
