Contained within the blister pack is a printed card insert that provides a contrasting background to the modules. I was hoping that OCZ may have come out with an entirely new design for this insert, but unfortunately it shares much the same design as the card used on their earlier DDR2 kits.

Around the back of the card are excerpts from previous OCZ reviews by several other websites. It would have been nice to see some kind of specifications table, but as the card inserts are no doubt mass-produced, it would make things considerably harder (and more expensive) to have a different insert for every model of OCZ memory.


Appearance

The PC3-12800 Platinum modules utilise OCZ's patented XTC heatspreader. The XTC heatspreaders ensure that the thermal management of memory modules is promoted through greater airflow and by means of micro-convection throughout what is usually the dead air space inside conventional heatspreader designs. In this manner, build-up of heat is avoided and thermal dissipation of the memory components is offloaded more efficiently through the honeycomb design. At the same time, mechanical stability is maintained.


For those of us with a keen eye, you will notice that OCZ have updated the XTC heatspreaders slightly for the DDR3 series by placing a '3' at the top right of the 'Z' logo. We could argue that OCZ should have made a more radical change to the XTC design to make the DDR3 kits easily distinguisable, but in all fairness most manufacturers have only made minor changes to their heatspreader designs for the arrival of DDR3.


The XTC heatspreaders are held in place with very thin double-sided thermal tape. This certainly proved to be a very effective method of securing the heatspreaders as removing them was extremely difficult. If you are planning on replacing the heatspreaders with an alternative solution (maybe water cooling?) then I would certainly suggest warming the modules up first and using a credit card to prize them apart.

It is an unfortunate fact that many memory kits tested here at Overclock3D fall at the first hurdle by not being able to run with 100% stability at their advertised stock settings. Therefore the first test for the Platinum kit was to test it's ability to run at 800mhz with 7-7-7-20 timings on 1.9v. As OCZ don't actually specify if the Platinum kit is designed to run at 1T or 2T, we opted to first test the stability of the kit at the higher performing setting of 1T.

By default the E6850 used in this review has a FSB frequency of 333mhz, which even with a 1:2 ratio on the memory falls far short of the stock 800mhz that the Platinum modules are capable of. Therefore, the FSB frequency of the E6850 was raised to 400mhz on a 1:2 divider to run the Platinum kit at exactly 800mhz. The multiplier of the CPU was also dropped from x9 to x8 in order to keep the core speed of the E6850 as close to it's stock 3.0ghz as possible.

After several hours of intense gaming benchmarks coupled with SuperPI and Prime95 stability testing, I'm pleased to say that the OCZ Platinum PC3-12800 kit didn't faulter once, thus showing that the kit is more than capable of running at OCZ's advertised speeds.

Everest is in many ways similar to Sisoft Sandra. Focusing mainly on Software and Hardware information reporting, Everest also comes with a benchmark utility suitable for testing the read, write and latency performance of the memory subsystem.

F.E.A.R. is a game based on the Lithtech Jupiter EX engine. It has volumetric lighting, soft shadows, parallax mapping and particle effects.Included in the game is a benchmark facility that taxes the entire PC system. This benchmark was run 3 times to ensure uniformity of results.