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	Patriot Viper 3 Black Mamba PV38G240C0K
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 an 8 GB kit, we use eight 750 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

When it comes to overclocking DDR3 memory, the relation between stable voltage, frequency and timings can usually be described in the following way: higher voltage allows running potentially lower CAS latency while lowest stable values of the three other primary timings remain primarily frequency-dependant.
That said, let us have a look at the numbers our Viper could achieve. At first glance, the 20-30MHz headroom above spec at rated timings and voltage does not look too impressive. However, by using higher latencies and/or more voltage we were easily able to crack DDR3-2600 at 10-13-12 and DDR3-2800 using 11-14-13, which are the sort of numbers you normally see by a memory located in a completely different price league.
While 1466MHz was as high as either of our platforms could remain fully stable at, it is not where raw frequency actually stopped. Joined by some voltage on a hot Saturday evening, we were able to pull off SuperPi 32M runs at DDR3-2933 CL10, DDR3-3200 CL11 and DDR3-3300 CL12 maxing out at DDR3-3500, all using regular aircooling.

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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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