Results

Performance memory is worth the extra money only when it’s used on a performance platform. These days, the name of the game is Intel Ivy Bridge, so that would be our primary testing rig.

Motherboard	Gigabyte Z77X-UD3H (BIOS F9)
CPU	Intel Core i7-3770K (ES, E0)
Graphic card	XFX 8600 GT
Memory	G.Skill RipjawsZ F3-19200CL9Q-16GBZHD
HDD	Samsung 40 GB
PSU	Silverstone OP1000
OS	Windows 7, 64 bit SP1

Our experience suggests that Prime 95 and HCI Memtest is the couple of tests feared most by unstable memory. We’ll select eight 750MB instance 100% pass of the latter as our yardstick for stability, as it is relatively quick and familiar for us way of testing things.
Even though Ivy Bridge has brought a lot more flexibility to memory overclocking in comparison with Sandy Bridge, it still has a number grey areas which you can’t reach manouvering with available memory multipliers and adjusting the BCLK between 98 and 108MHz, the values we found out to be the extremes of full stability. Because of that, we use a more flexible secondary platform, which will also be used to verify the overclocking results which we thought made little sense on the Ivy Bridge.

Motherboard	ASUS M5A99X (BIOS 0902)
CPU	AMD FX-8150
Graphic card	XFX 8600 GT
Memory	G.Skill RipjawsZ F3-19200CL9Q-16GBZHD
HDD	Samsung 40 GB
PSU	Silverstone OP1000
OS	Windows 7, 64 bit SP1

Unfortunately, due to memory controller limitations, which regular users are also very likely to encounter, both our platforms cannot support stable memory operation at frequency in excess of 1250MHz or DDR3-2500 so no testing above that will be done. As this will be our first really thorough test of Hynix BFR based memory, we went to try as many timing and voltage combinations as we found worthy.

The results are in and people sitting in white coats in front of their computers would definitely notice two main patterns.
First of all, it turns out that Hynix BFR chips tend to hit certain “walls” using specific tRCD and tRP combinations regardless of used CAS latency or voltage. In other words, maximum frequency will eventually be the same whether you’re on 8-10-10 or 10-10-10. And secondly, it’s not hard to see that when not being limited by tRCD and tRP voltage scaling is almost linear.
For others, who are not so much into memory overclocking, we would say that it’s always nice to see memory clear the specification with room to spare, especially as tough as the one set by G.Skill. Ivy Bridge is all about high memory frequency, but if your memory controller would be even weaker than ours, you would still be alright as you’d have DDR3-2000 7-9-9 and DDR3-2200 8-10-9 to choose from. Sadly, we weren’t able to conduct any high frequency testing, but judging by how the blue CL10 line goes on the chart, memory should have no problems with stable operation as DDR3-2600 and above, not even mentioning CL11 or CL12 which we simply found too ridicilous to test.

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 4 - Results
Page 2 - Closer Look	Page 5 - Conclusion
Page 3 - Photo Gallery

Discuss this article in the forums