Overclocking & Testing Procedures
Since this is a triple channel memory kit we will be installing it in our X58 system. This system is comprised an Intel Core i7 965 Extreme, Gigabyte X58A-UD5 motherboard, Sapphire Radeon HD 6950 video card, 750GB SATA drive, Blu-ray drive, and Zalman ZM1000-HP Plus 1000W power supply, all inside the BitFenix Colossus case.
When you install the memory in your system you will need to get it up to speed. Crucial Ballistix memory supports XMP profiles so all you have to do is enable the XMP profile in your BIOS and you are good to go. Once you enable the XMP profile your memory should be running at 1866MHz with timings of 9-9-9-24, although for some reason the XMP put it at 9-9-9-25. Also if we look at the SPD it says for 1866Mhz the timings should be 10-10-10-27? Not sure why this is, but I changed the timings to 9-9-9-24 for testing.
Overclocking memory on X58 systems is pretty easy. You basically just need to set your SPD and then mess around with the BCLK frequency. With the tight timings of 9-9-9-24 I was able to achieve a stable overclock of 2016MHz, which is a 150MHz overclock. Not that bad and we really cannot expect to get that much out of memory that already has a high clock speed.
For memory testing we have a battery of benchmarks and tests we use. I have listed them below.
AIDA64 (download)
– Cache & Memory Benchmark
Sisoftware Sandra 2011 (download)
– Memory Bandwidth Benchmark
– Memory Latency Benchmark
– Cache & Memory Benchmark
Now on to testing!
