Testing Method & Test Setup

It's the first time we are dealing with Micron's D9PBC chips so 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 750MB instances of HCI Memtest that is considered one of the toughest memory stress-tests around.

Motherboard	ASUS Maximus V Gene (BIOS 1204)
CPU	Intel Core i7-3770K @ 4.0 GHz
Graphic card	ASUS GTX 580
Memory	GeIL Evo Veloce GEV316GB1866C10DC
HDD	Intel SSD 330 120 GB
PSU	Seasonic Platinum 1000 Watts
OS	Windows 7, 64 bit SP1

Results

But immediately, we encountered a couple of issues. First, we found out that GeIL’s SPD sets the subtimings too tight, making high frequencies 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 recent Micron 2Gb D9 chips we tested previously, our Evo Veloce fells flat on their face using identical primary timings. Raising tRCD by one value above tCL and tRP has noticeably improved the situation.



As you can see from the results chart, past 1.5 Volt scaling comes to an end. More juice only increases the power consumption. Usually Micron ICs are able to digest higher voltages. It would be interesting to test a memory kit made by Crucial to see if the problem really is related to the IC itself, the SPD or the PCB. We reckon - with our past experiences - that limited voltage scaling is caused by an imperfect PCB design.

At the moment this kit looks very bad but in fact it isn't. Check out the results, the kit can achieve much higher frequency than the specs at only 1.35v. At 1.5v it is even stable at 1'020 MHz with the rated timings which is 87 MHz more than the frequency the kit has been specified for.
But in order to obtain the best of the kit you will have to raise timings a bit to 11-12-11-34 and set the voltage to 1.65v. In this case the kit will fly, 1'200 MHz was almost reached 400 % stable.
If you are scared to use 1.65v on a 1.5v rated memory kit then you can keep 1.5v and lower the timings to 9-10-9-28. In this scenario we were able to run the Evo Veloce at 980 MHz.

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

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