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 F5s)
CPU	Intel Core i7-4770K ES @ 4.0 GHz
Graphic card	ASUS GTX 580
Memory	Kingston HyperX 10th Year Anniversary Edition KHX18C9X3K2/8X
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 8 GB kit, we use eight 750 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

As predicted a couple of pages back, use of Hynix CFR chips makes more things possible than just the specs. For example, our sample is able to run at DDR3-2133 with 10-11-10-30 and DDR-2400 with 11-13-12-32 without exceeding the psychological voltage barrier of 1.65V.
Of course, anything above specification should be treated as a free gift left for users to discover, but since our kit is labelled a limited edition of an enthusiast product, one could expect it to produce better than mediocre overclocking results, especially knowing the full potential of Hynix CFR chips in use.

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Page 1 - Introduction

Page 2 - Closer Look

Page 3 - Photo Gallery

Page 4 - Results

Page 5 - Conclusion