Testing Method & Test Setup

To test the overclocking capabilities of the memory we are going to use Intel’s recently released Haswell platform. As memory overclocks are known to vary between different motherboards, we are going to perform the tests using two different platforms to be sure that our numbers are reliable.

Motherboard	ASUS Maximus VI Gene (BIOS 0607) Gigabyte Z87X-OC (BIOS F4)
CPU	Intel Core i7-4770K ES @ 4.0 GHz
Graphic card	ASUS GTX 580
Memory	Crucial Ballistix Sport XT BLS2C8G3D18ADS3CEU
SSD	Samsung PM840 Pro
PSU	Seasonic Platinum 660 Watts
OS	Windows 7, 64 bit SP1

Even though Haswell is very flexible on the memory frequency one can set, very few people actually do base clock (BCLK) overclocking on their daily setups. Therefore, instead of our previous procedure of fixing the voltage and raising the frequency in 10MHz steps we are now going to fix the frequency and minimize the voltage in 0.01V steps.
As usual, our stability method of choice is HCI Memtest. Since we are dealing with a 16 GB kit, we use eight 1500 MB instances and call things stable if we see all of them to go past 100% without showing a single error.
Not to get things too complicated, we only set the primary timings, command rate (1T) and the memory voltage by hand while the rest of the settings is left for the motherboard and SPD to agree on.

Results

In a typical Micron IC fashion, the Ballistix Sport are able to react to voltage changes all the way up to 1.9V. However, more voltage can only help to lower the CAS latency while lowest stable values of three other primary timings seem to only depend on the memory frequency.
That said, very few people are actually going to push more than 1.7V through memory using their daily setups and the lower voltage range is where things do not look good for the Micron. While it is possible to run our kit at DDR3-2133 with timings of 10-11-11-30 at 1.68V, the kit barely shows a 60MHz overclock using default timing and voltage values. Of course, one might say that we expect too much but let’s not forget about the competition which can produce more interesting results on modules of similar density.

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Page 1 - Introduction

Page 2 - Closer Look

Page 3 - Photo Gallery

Page 4 - Results

Page 5 - Conclusion

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