OCZ Flex XLC 9200

It's showtime in the stratospheric price and performance SuperRAM wars.

So it’s on. OCZ’s Flex versus Corsair’s Dominator. While the Dominator comes with its own fan array, OCZ has one-upped Corsair and included water-cooling sockets on these crazy industrial styled sticks. You’ll have to provide your own water-cooling solution of course – OCZ just supplies the ability for you to add the RAM into an existing circuit.

We have no doubt that the water-cooling reduces the operational degrees, however considering that RAM can operate at high temperatures it probably won’t help in the overclocking of the sticks themselves – more to just keep the ambient temperature of your entire machine down. Certainly during operation the sticks were easily touchable, even operating above 1200MHz and at 2.475v.

The Flex XLCs come at a chafingly-fast 9200 rating, or 1150MHz at 5-5-5-18. Yes, you’ll pay through the nose for them, but that’s some damn fast RAM.

The first port of call on the testing circuit was the ASUS Commando to see how the sticks would go on an Intel 965-based board. While they happily ran at the rated speed, netting 8142MB/s, 5160MB/s and 56.0ns in Everest’s read, write and latency tests respectively, the sticks refused to be clocked any higher. Giving up on the 965, we returned to our default EVGA 680i board for extra memory flexibility and got to tweaking.

While the same results were returned for the default speeds, using the unlinked mode we managed to push up to 1220MHz stable at the same timings, achieving 8263MB/s, 5549MB/s and 53.5ns. While we could push 1260MHz, the system was unfortunately not Orthos stable.

Going the other way we clocked down to 1066MHz at 4-4-4-10, yielding a slightly faster 8290MB/s, 5480MB/s and 50.6ns.

Deciding to tempt fate we clocked down even further to 800MHz, the gambit paying off as we attained a stunning 3-3-3-3 at 1T – let’s just say that again – 1T – pushing our results to 9063MB/s, 5480MB/s and 48.7ns.

OCZ has done itself proud on some insanely fast RAM. For the average user it’s complete overkill, and they may as well save at least $400 and get some cheaper kit – but if memory bandwidth means the world to you and you have a wad of cash smouldering a hole in your wallet, then you have no choice but to grab these sticks.