Review: Vengeance is a dish best served cold... or maybe overclocked, if it's Corsair's new Vengeance RAM, anyway.
Corsair is well known for its high quality power supply units, cases and cooling solutions. It just so happens that Corsair’s pretty darn good at memory too. We've been handed a triple-channel kit of high density 4GB modules, for a total of 12GB of solid state fun!
This kit features lightweight aluminium heat spreaders which do a surprisingly good job at dissipating heat. To the touch, they remained cool during testing. Tacky stickers adorn the black modules with branding and technical specifications, while a green PCB humbly houses the memory ICs.
But what's fancy memory without benchmarks to wave around? To start the benching session, we set the i7 920 to 3.5GHz and adjusted the memory multiplier and base clock to get 1670MHz on the modules at stock latencies. This produced mediocre results including read throughput of 16938MB/s. Naturally, these modules weren't designed to sit at stock, so we ramped up the megahertz to 1992, the voltage to 1.7v, and loosened the latencies slightly to maintain stability.
Now we're talking.
20131MB/s read, and 16586MB/s write – a significant improvement over stock. PiFast took a slight hit because of the looser latencies, yet wPrime managed to edge ahead at 10.905s for 32M calculations. This was the highest stable clock rate we could manage, so it was time to try tight latencies instead.
We hit the jackpot at 8-9-8-21-T1 and stock clock rate, and then continued to push the frequency to extract any extra performance. 1750MHz at 1.65v proved stable, leaving us with a respectable 18868MB/s Everest read throughput. Clearly clock rate is beneficial over latencies when it comes down to performance.
All in all, these low voltage Vengeance modules overclock exceptionally well, which is surprising considering the amount of memory being addressed. Performance is equally impressive, especially when the low price of $205 is factored in. 12GB of highly overclockable memory? Yes please!
Issue: 137 | June, 2012