Overclocking memory is a two fold operation, we like to find the max speed (Mhz) and the tightest timings. The first thing we did was test for the fastest Mhz we could achieve. We gave the motherboard a boost in CPU VTT up to 1.35v, and raised the memory voltage to 1.7v. The best we could come up with is 2050 Mhz. Not bad considering these modules run at the rated 2000 Mhz extremely well, and even at that speed allow the user a lot of headroom when overclocking their CPU. The bad news is that we had to raise the timings to 9-10-9 to get it stable which in the end gave us a worse SuperPI score than when tested at the rated speed and timings of 2000 Mhz and 8-9-8.
Next we lowered the memory ratio setting by one, from 2:10 to 2:8, this gave us a memory speed of 1600 Mhz while the CPU clock stayed at 4.0 Ghz. After quite a bit of testing and experiments with different timings, we were able to achieve a stable timing setting of 6-7-6 at default memory voltage of 1.65v. We benched these settings using SuperPI 1M and MaxxMem.
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Did you notice what we noticed? That’s right, at 1600 Mhz and tighter timings, the SuperPI 1M score and the MaxxMem scores (except latency) were all better than at the rated 2000 Mhz and default 8-9-8 timings! So, what have we learned boys and girls? Raw Mhz is only half the story when performance is concerned. We loved the fact that you can run this memory at a slower Mhz and still get the performance by tightening it up a little. This OCZ3P2000C8LV4GK kit really shined when tighter timings were used.
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