G.Skill FLARE PC3-16000 Memory Review
Testbed & Frequencies
Published: 8th October 2010 | Source: G.Skill | Price: £159 |
Testbed
AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition
BIOSTAR TA890FXE Motherboard
4GB G.Skill Flare PC3-16000 RAM
4GB Kingston HyperX DDR3-1866 RAM
Samsung Spinpoint F1 320GB SATA II Hard Disk Drive
nVidia GeForce GTX 460 768MB GDDR5
Samsung 22x DVD+/-RW SATA
Windows 7 Home Premium x64
Forceware 258.96 Drivers
The Road to 2000MHz DDR...
Normally this would be a section dedicated to memory overclocking, but we felt that the circumstances commanded a slight name change.
The truth of it is that not every AMD Phenom II processor will be able to assist you productively in your endeavours to reach high memory frequencies. While processor yields continue to improve, there are still samples in circulation which are very flakey beyond 1600MHz.
The particular sample in my possession could well be one of the worst around but regardless I set about pushing our G.Skill Flame samples as close to their rated frequencies as possible. Sadly as great as my intentions may have been, my attempts weren't particularly fruitful.
With voltages notched up across the board, we reached a maximum frequency of just 1720MHz. No amount of refinement (looser timings, greater voltages, different memory ratio combinations) could offer a greater result. As it was clear that the memory itself was not the limitation we then decided to set its timings as tight as possible. After a short play, we found ourselves with a timing set of 8-8-7-24 1T.
Another point of view to consider is that sheer memory frequency isn't entirely the answer on AMD's Socket AM3 platform. With this in mind we hoped to determine the lowest timing set possible at the highest default frequency available on most boards; DDR3-1600.
Again, it seemed that our processor was a great limiting factor, as it was only possible to achieve this with a higher base HTT and lower memory ratio. Regardless, with a memory frequency of 1600MHz we attained a timing set of 7-7-6-20 1T. This to us was an impressive result.
Most Recent Comments
ASUS M4A89TD PRO
ASUS M4A89GTD PRO
ASUS M4A88TD-V EVO/USB3
*The Asus Crosshair Formula is also compatible, though it does not say so on the compatible motherboards list.
Sorry btw if im just stating the obvious to you though matey. I'm probably just being a dick.
CSS Valid
Continue Reading