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	Corsair Vengeance Pro CMY16GX3M2A1866C9
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 16 GB kit, we use eight 1500 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

As we were dealing with memory based on chips we might not have had before, we had to start from scratch, i.e. try every possible timing combination. After some time, we managed to narrow things down to eight timing combinations that made most sense. Also, we discovered that maximum stable frequency is a function of voltage, but whereas Micron chips of the older days could scale up to 2.0V with ease, these new ones were already having stability issues running at 1.8V.
In the end, we were able to get the memory running at DDR3-2000 with 8-9-10-24 and DDR3-2200 with 9-9-10-27, both times without exceeding a psychological voltage barrier of 1.65V. We could also achieve stability at 1200MHz, a.k.a. DDR3-2400 but doing so required loosening up the timings and pushing the voltage past 1.7V so it might not be the best thing to do from a daily user’s perspective.

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Page 1 - Introduction

Page 2 - Closer Look

Page 3 - Photo Gallery

Page 4 - Results

Page 5 - Conclusion