Testing - Overclocking

One of the main things I have always liked about Corsair memory is the ability to overclock while maintaining tight timings. It's good to get 150-200 extra mHz out of memory, but sometimes I feel like I've defeated the purpose when I have to raise the CAS two or three points.i.e overclocking a memory from DDR3-1600 9-9-9, to DDR3-1750 12-12-12. I'm hoping to do much better than that with the TW3X4G1600C9DHXNV.

During my overclocking testing, I was able to get the memory to DDR3-1866 with some stability, but I ended up backing it off to DDR3-1818 10-11-11-25, 1.8v. I was satisfied with that but I did experience a small amount of instability in a couple of benchmarks. That's when I read Corsair's test results, and also when I decided to flash to the beta BIOS.

Corsair got the memory to DDR3-1800 9-9-9-24 at 1.7v. Wow. They also experienced the slight instability I did, actually at anything over DDR3-1700, they cured that by bumping up the NB voltage to 1.5v. It worked for me too.

There were two new settings in the 0405 BIOS under the memory timings section, "P1" and "P2". By changing those from "Auto" to "Enabled", I not only achieved the results that Corsair did, I actually got the memory up to DDR3-1818 9-9-9-24 at 1.7v. Very impressive indeed, from a memory verified at DDR3-1600 9-9-9-24. That's what I expect from Corsair memory.

Testing - Benchmarks

To check out the performance and stability of the memory, I ran a battery of benchmarks. I would have liked to have used Corsair's results as a comparison, but they used a pair of 8800GTXs in SLI in their test rig, and since nearly all of their benchmarks involved graphics, the comparison was pretty lopsided.

I decided that it would be interesting to test the Corsair XMS3 DHX DDR3-1600 4GB kit against a 2GB DDR3-1600 kit, to see what kind of results I'd see. I used the Aeneon Xtune DDR3-1600 2 gig kit, at the best timings I could get, 9-8-8-29, while I ran the Corsair XMS3 at DDR3-1600 8-7-7-24, the best timings that I could get with it.

The Corsair won in every single benchmark. Very impressive.