Apacer WCG Edition PC2-8500

Chunky, fast and green. Will suit your PC’s décor and perform at the same time.

Excluding Corsair’s Dominator, these Apacer sticks have the most expansive heatsink we’ve seen. It also marks the first time we’ve seen modules decked out in reflective forest green, if that’s the sort of thing that floats our boat.

The ASUS Extreme Striker mobo didn’t seem to like this set of sticks running at 1066MHz, so out came the MSI 965P Platinum, which quite happily hit the requisite frequency at 5-5-5-15, giving us 5522MB/s and 5577MB/s in Sandra’s Memory Bandwidth tests, INT and FLOAT respectively.

Unfortunately despite the name, the sticks didn’t want to go much past their native speed, unable to hit the 1100MHz mark regardless of the voltage. We were able to drop the CAS down to four, which gave us a stable result of 5710MB/s and 5660MB/s.

Determined to squeeze out more we dropped the default speed back to 800MHz, dropped the multiplier on the CPU and pumped up the FSB to see where the sticks could go. Although we were able to hit higher speeds, with stability in mind we could only reach 900MHz at 5-4-4-15. Any higher and Stress Prime 2004 started having errors.

Although the Apacer is called Overclocking RAM, it doesn’t seem to have much of a ceiling – still, it hits its advertised values, and so we can’t punish it too much. If you like your forest green heatsinks then you can’t go too badly - although we’d advise you pass on your chlorophyll-filled instincts and go Corsair or OCZ.