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 KHX16C9T3K4/32X
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 it is possible can set, very few people actually do base clock (BCLK) overclocking with 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 32 GB kit, we use eight 2000 MB instances and call things stable if we see all of them to go past 150% 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 are 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.
For what is most likely a binning reject, we find the results our 1600C9 kit could achieve very impressive. Not only do these have an easy 150MHz headroom above spec, but ability to run DDR3-2200 with 9-11-10-30 or DDR3-2400 with 10-12-11-30 also allows this kit to compete in higher leagues.

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Page 1 - Introduction

Page 2 - Closer Look

Page 3 - Photo Gallery

Page 4 - Results

Page 5 - Conclusion