Patriot PC3-14400
2. Overclocking
Below you see our test PC configuration we used for all the benchmarks.
- CPU: Intel Q9300 Retail
- Motherboard: Asus Striker II Extreme BIOS 0901
- PSU: OCZ GameXStream GXS600 SLI-Ready
- VGA: MSI 7600GT Silent (stock memory/core timings)
- HDD: WD 800JB
- OS: Windows VISTA 32bit SP1 with all the latest updates installed
Our goal is to find out how stable the memory modules in various frequencies with the lowest available timings. This is a rather " test and trial procedure" and the results can vary among different motherboard and of chipsets.
The memory modules are designed to work perfectly with the Nvidia 790i chipset, so we hope that our test PC configuration will allow for high performance. All tests were done with memory unlinked, allowing us to leave the CPU clock at its stock speed and overclock the memory at our desired levels.
Starting from 1333MHz FSB (666MHz memory), we managed to get low timings down to 6-5-6-8 with 1T, with the voltage set at 1.90V and no special bios settings.
Since we had the memory unlinked with cpu, we pumped up FSB to 800MHz (1600MHz effective). This time we had to rise to CL7 with rather low timings of 7-6-5-8-2T, again at 1.90V:
Reaching 1800MHz was not a big issue; we got them with 8-7-6-8-2T @ 1.90V. Remember that the memory is rated at 1800MHz with 8-8-8-20 timings, so it was a nice surprise to see much lower numbers:
So what's the top speed for this memory module? To be honest, our test trials reached the 1964MHz with 1.90V. Of course we had to rise up timings to 9-9-9-20 but anyway it's good to see that the memory reached 164MHz higher than its ratings:
It is possible that the memory modules can go even higher with the proper motherboard and of course corresponding BIOS settings. For our tests, we left most of the settings at Auto.