Corsair Vengeance DDR3-1600 8GB Dual Channel Memory Kit Review

Overclocking
This is always one of my favorite parts of testing, to try to push the product to its limits and to achieve the best speeds while not sacrificing the system being stable. As always with overclocking the memory you will have to boot into the BIOS and go to the OC settings and look for your memory settings. So let’s jump right into this and try to see how far we can go.

We already know that the stock settings are at 1600 MHz at 9-9-9-24 timings with the voltage at 1.5v. So we ran the tests at that speeds starting off. Now I try to go up to the max with the system starting at 100 MHz increases on the memory till it BSOD’d and then trying to fine tune it from there for a stable overclock.

So in my BIOS on the ASRock P55 Exetreme4 I just go to the OC tweaker menu and then set the overclock mode to manual, from there I just up the BCLK Freq to 170 and then had to lower my CPU Ratio to 16 to get the processor close to running at the stock speeds. So with the BCLK at 170 MHz and the CPU ratio at 16 you achieve 1700MHz memory speeds along with the processors core speed at 2.71 GHz with the Intel I5-750. Here is the CPU-Z screen shoots with the Corsair memory at 1700 MHz.

Corsair Vengeance DDR3-1600 8GB Dual Channel Memory Kit Corsair Vengeance DDR3-1600 8GB Dual Channel Memory Kit Corsair Vengeance DDR3-1600 8GB Dual Channel Memory Kit

Now we are going to increase the memory another 100 MHz to try and hit 1800 MHz.  So with this we just set the BCLK to 180 MHz and then changed the CPU ratio to 15. With this all setup you will have the Corsair Memory at 1800 MHz and the Processor running at closer to stock speeds at 2.69 GHz. Here are the screen shots of the CPU-Z of the Corsair memory at 1800 MHz.

Corsair Vengeance DDR3-1600 8GB Dual Channel Memory Kit Corsair Vengeance DDR3-1600 8GB Dual Channel Memory Kit Corsair Vengeance DDR3-1600 8GB Dual Channel Memory Kit

So I went on to 1900 MHz doing the same methods and then I decided to just try for the highest I could get and the highest stable I was able to get was with the BCLK at 200 and the CPU ratio set at 14, along with the DRAM voltage at 1.65v. With these settings we had our test system running at 2.79 GHz and the memory running at 2000 MHz.  Now with these settings I was only able to get it to work at the timings 10-10-10-27 which is no bad at all with the memory running 2000 MHz.  Here are some of the screen shots of Corsair memory at 2000 MHz.

Corsair Vengeance DDR3-1600 8GB Dual Channel Memory Kit Corsair Vengeance DDR3-1600 8GB Dual Channel Memory Kit Corsair Vengeance DDR3-1600 8GB Dual Channel Memory Kit