GEIL's Evo Corsa RAM a compelling choice

Review: GEIL's new RAM kit comes in a rather... odd colour, but are otherwise fast and very, very tasty.

GEIL is a name we haven't heard from in a while. There must be something about X79 that has inspired them to poke their head out and inspect the playing field. We got our hands on their quad channel kit, the 2133MHz Evo Corsa running at relatively tight 9-11-9-28 latencies.

At this point in the tech scene, having ultra fast memory is typically a goal set by benchmarkers to squeeze out a slightly faster PiFast score. There are other  benefits to having faster memory, such as relieving bottleneck to an overclocked CPU, however 1600MHz is usually more than adequate.

We're not too sure about the colour chosen by GEIL. We can see this being a welcome addition to a funky fluoro based theme, but otherwise, there aren't many components on the market that would match it. Also note that the tall fins of the modules may interfere with low mounted CPU heatsinks.

When tested on the Rampage IV Extreme reviewed this month, we were delighted to see promising performance figures. With the Intel i7 3960X clocked at 4.7GHz, and the memory at stock settings, the Evo Corsa kit blitzed through our benchmarks. We then increased the clock rate from 2133Mhz to 2309MHz, increased the voltage to 1.7v (up from 1.65v), and loosened the timings to 11-11-11-28 2T. This increased read and write transfer rate in AIDA by a nominal amount, but otherwise, it didn't have too much of an effect.

Although our overclock didn't yield much of an improvement over stock figures, it did manage to compete well with our reference G.Skill RipjawsZ modules.

We couldn't track down an Australian retailer that stocks the modules, so it's difficult to comment on the value. If they can be found at prices comparable, or even cheaper than the RipjawsZ sticks, then this is definitely a compelling buy.