Review: The label says they're not to be handled by unauthorised personnel, but we installed them anyway. Naughty Atomic.
Unauthorised personnel only? Well, that’s what the yellow warning sticker securing the individually-wrapped memory modules states. Since Atomic is always authorised to do anything, we proceed to unwrap and install the unsuspecting chips into our test bench.
Team Group’s self-proclaimed ‘Overclocking memory modules’ perform nicely, unleashes their overclocking headroom by attaining a maximum clock rate of 1750MHz at the default latencies.
After much fiddling, the lowest latencies at 1750MHz were a mildly disappointing 9-9-9-24-1T, the only difference being the command rate. This small change did produce a 2ns latency drop, in addition to a small improvement in read/write throughput. Alas, this made little difference to PiFast and wPrime results, the latter actually coming out approximately 0.2s slower.
Raising latencies to CL10 refused to lift the 1750MHz barrier. This left us desperately short of the 1866MHz required to run overclocked on our shiny new Sandy Bridge machine (you get 16x and then 18.6x as a memory multiplier, with an effectively fixed 100MHz base clock). So if you’re looking at these sticks for P67 overclocking runs, you’re likely to be stuck at stock. Naturally, expecting a 288MHz overclock is quite a demand, so this was not surprising.
Physically, these RAM modules are compact, with nothing across the top to prevent large heatsinks from being installed.
The Green PCB is an aethetic letdown – we can only guess that it’s a cost-cutting measure.
Overall, the memory does perform quite well with a respectable 150MHz overclock, and at $161 for 8GB, it’s not a bad buy either.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012