Corsair Vengeance 8GB Dual Channel DDR3 Memory Kit (CMZ8GX3M2A1600C9B)
Aug 25th, 2011 | By JaredI mentioned in the unboxing that the heatspreaders are tall and could interfere with larger CPU coolers. As you can see here they come close to the fan on my MSI P55-GD65 but thankfully I utilize the outside DIMM slots so I am able to avoid any issues. Now that we have them installed let’s first see what this 8GB kit of Vengeance can do.
This 8GB Dual Channel DDR3 memory kit, model number CMZ8GX3M2A1600C9B, is rated at 800MHz (DDR3-1600). First up is to see what additional performance we can get out of it via overclocking. The first step of my overclocking foray was to increase the frequency, without adjusting the stock voltage of 1.5v, until the system became unstable. I defined stability as successfully passing a loop of 3DMark Vantage as well as at least 3 hours of Prime95. Of course the system also had to pass a week of regular PC usage (including all of the testing benchmarks and regular gaming) at that frequency for at least a week to make sure there were no abnormal restarts or program errors. The Vengeance kit reached just 833 MHz (DDR3-1666), up from 800 MHz which honestly kind of disappointed me.
The second overclocking test I did was to see how tight of timing I could reach using the stock speeds before the system became unstable. The same rules apply, no voltage changes and stability has the same definition as above. I pushed the timing down to 9-9-8-23 from 9-9-9-24.
Much like we did with the 8GB Vengeance kit tested back in January, I also tried upping the voltage to 1.65v to see what additional boosts we could get. With a frequency of 937 MHz achieved in that earlier kit I hoped to get to at least there but sadly I could not get this kit to go above 840 MHz without failing Prime95 after just a few minutes. I realize that overclocking is always a gamble but expected to be able to squeeze more out of this kit particularly with looser timings. However this Vengeance kit does carry some decent timing stock so let’s see what kind of numbers we get.