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 F5q)
CPU	Intel Core i7-4770K ES @ 4.0 GHz
Graphic card	ASUS GTX 580
Memory	Kingston HyperX Beast KHX24C11T3K2/16X
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 usual, we test to see how memory reacts to voltage changes and in case with Hynix MFR this reaction translates in ability to run higher frequencies without having to raise the CAS latency.
Despite the memory being able to lower the timings to predicted 10-12-11 at rated frequency and run as DDR3-2600, we are not too happy with the results for two reasons. Firstly, the numbers above took a hefty voltage increase to achieve and, secondly, during our testing we experienced something which felt like a compatibility issue between the memory and the ASUS board at frequencies north of 1100MHz effectively making specs impossible to achieve. After following all the suggestions proposed by Kingston’s R&D department, we still couldn’t get the memory to run meaning that we had to complete the 1200MHz+ part of the testing using a Gigabyte board.

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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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