Testing Method & Test Setup

Knowing about D9PFJ’s capabilities from recent Ballistix reviews, we armed ourselves with an Ivy Bridge testing platform that should allow our memory to show every last bit of its overclocking potential.
To make sure that our figures represent the sort of stability safe to use ever day, we are going to run each setting until we get a 150% pass of eight 375MB instances of HCI Memtest that is considered one of the toughest memory stress-tests around.

Motherboard	ASUS Maximus V Gene (BIOS 0086)
CPU	Intel Core i7-3770K
Graphic card	XFX 8600 GT
Memory	Kingston HyperX Lovo KHX1600C9D3LK2/4GX
HDD	Samsung 40 GB
PSU	Silverstone OP1000
OS	Windows 7, 64 bit SP1

Results

But immediately, we encountered a couple of issues. First, we found out that Kingston’s SPD sets the subtimings too tight, making frequencies in excess of 800MHz unreachable without manual adjustments. On the screenshot below we demonstrate which values we had to loosen when testing the overclocking capabilities of our kit.



Another thing, we’ve noticed is that unlike all D9PFJ we tested previously, our LoVos fell flat on their face using even primary timings. Raising tRCD by one value above tCL and tRP has noticeably improved the situation.



As you can see in the results chart, maximum stable frequency is a function of voltage only up to 1.65-1.70V, past which more juice only makes things worse. Knowing that Micron ICs are able to digest a lot more voltage, we flashed them with an SPD from 2GB Ballistix sticks to eliminate the sub-sub-settings as a culprit for such phenomena. Unfortunately, SPD didn’t make any difference, so we reckon that limited voltage scaling is caused by imperfect PCB design.
Either way, even from results leading to 1.65V we see that D9PFJ samples used on our LoVo are nowhere near the quality of higher-end offerings, which indicates that there is serious binning going behind the curtain. For example, in order to operate our kit as DDR3-2133 one must use a very loose timing set of 11-12-11-30 that will render the frequency gain useless. Therefore, it’s safe to say that the LoVo’s are not a well-clocking memory even despite the ICs and low rated voltage that initially promised a lot more than we got.

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

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