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	Corsair Vengeance Pro CMY16GX3M2A2400C10R
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

The common practice on modern DDR3 memory is voltage only playing a role when it comes down to lowering the CAS latency with three other primary timings being voltage-unaffected. As it is known, Samsung chips (like the used on our Vengeance) are able to react to voltage changes up to 2.0V even though we are not fully certain whether values above 1.8V are suitable for daily application.
Either way, we could still get our kit to work stable at 1000MHz 7-9-10-27, 1100MHz 8-9-11-27 and 1200MHz 9-10-12-30 none of which were possible with a similarly rated G.Skill TridentX set we tested a year ago.
As usual with memory based on Samsung high-density chips, no full stability above DDR3-2500 possible, however, we were able to boot and pull a SuperPi 32M at 1300MHz with CL9 just for our own entertainment.

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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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