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	Kingston HyperX Beast KHX18C10T3K2/16X
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

As typical for Hynix MFR-based memory, raising the voltage has the biggest affect on the CAS latency by allowing to run potentially lower values. The rest of the primary timings only react to voltage changes in borderline stability scenarios with the main parameter dictating lowest stable values being the memory frequency.
Comparing results to some of the MFR-based memory that we previously tested, first thing that springs into attention is the necessity to use relatively high tRP values on this particular kit. Ultimately, it translates into the inability of our review sample to operate at rated frequency of 933MHz using rated tRP 10, which is a major letdown.
On the plus side, the same kit had no issues to run as DDR3-2133 with 9-11-12-30 and DDR3-2400 with 11-12-13-32 at voltages acceptable for long-term use. We weren’t, however, able to crack the DDR3-2600 mark common for Hynix MFR but 40% overclocks are also not something to be expected out of every memory kit out there.

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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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