Testing Method & Test Setup

It's the first time we are dealing with Micron's D9OBJ chips so we armed ourselves with an Ivy Bridge testing platform that should allow our memory to show every last bit of its overclocking potential.
To make sure that our figures represent the sort of stability safe to use ever day, we are going to run each setting until we get a 150% pass of eight 1500MB instances of HCI Memtest that is considered one of the toughest memory stress-tests around.

Motherboard	ASUS Maximus V Gene (BIOS 1204)
CPU	Intel Core i7-3770K @ 4.0 GHz
Graphic card	ASUS GTX 580
Memory	Crucial Ballistix Sport VLP BLS2C8G3D1609ES2LX0CEU
HDD	Intel SSD 330 120 GB
PSU	Seasonic Platinum 1000 Watts
OS	Windows 7, 64 bit SP1

Results

First of all we have noticed that unlike all recent Micron 2Gb D9 chips we tested previously those 4Gb D9 fall flat on their face using identical primary timings. Raising tRCD and tRP by one value above tCL has noticeably improved the situation.

Secondly, you can see from the results chart, past 1.65 Volt scaling comes to an end. More juice only increases the power consumption and heat. Usually Micron ICs are able to digest higher voltages, but it looks like here it's not the case with 4Gb chips unfortunately.
Still with 1.65v we managed to push the kit all the way up to DDR3-1980 CL9 and DDR3-2160 CL10 which is very good considering the form factor and the capacity of these memory modules. Small design, Big performance!

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 4 - Results
Page 2 - Closer Look	Page 5 - Conclusion
Page 3 - Photo Gallery

Discuss this article in the forums