Installation
Processor: AMD Phenom II X6 Black Edition 1100T
Motherboard: MSI 890FXA-GD65
Power: Antec High Current Gamer 750W
Installation is pretty easy, since it’s just a matter of popping in two sticks of RAM. Since we used this RAM on a new build we didn’t have any issues, at first, installing the RAM, but once we went to install our CPU cooler, the Thermaltake Jing, we had some issues.
Pick your blame, either the heatspreaders on the RAM were too high, or the clearance on the Thermaltake Jing wasn’t enough. Either way, we had to move the RAM two slots over, thus disabling the Dual Channel feature that requires slots 0 and 1. We ended up just switching out the CPU cooler for another one, the Zalman CNPS9000 MAX and had no issues with the RAM.
Testing
We used the following programs for testing:
AIDA64 (download)
– Cache & Memory Benchmark
SiSoftware Sandra 2011 (download)
– Memory Bandwidth Benchmark
– Memory Latency Benchmark
– Cache & Memory Benchmark
AMD OverDrive Benchmark (download)
We included AMD OverDrive in this review because this is not only an AMD based system, but also AMD Black Edition Ready RAM.
We first did our testing at the stock DDR3-1333 at 9-9-9-24, and then just simply overclocked the RAM in the BIOS (or alternatively inside of the AMD OverDrive) to DDR3-1600 at 9-11-11-29. I just simply raised the memory clock from 667MHz to 800MHz. You can see the memory related sections in AMD OverDrive below:
And the rest of our benchmarking results:
| AIDA64 | DDR3-1333 9-9-9-24 | DDR3-1600 9-11-11-29 |
| Read (MB/s) | 8342 | 8931 |
| Write (MB/s) | 6935 | 6894 |
| Copy (MB/s) | 10322 | 11218 |
| Sandra Memory Bandwidth | DDR3-1333 9-9-9-24 | DDR3-1600 9-11-11-29 |
| Performance(GB/s) | 11.44 | 12 |
| Int (GB/s) | 11.45 | 12 |
| Float (GB/s) | 11.42 | 12 |
| Sandra Memory Latency | DDR3-1333 9-9-9-24 | DDR3-1600 9-11-11-29 |
| Memory Latency (ns) | 90.6 | 83.9 |
| Speed Factor | 103.5 | 95.5 |
| Sandra Cache & Memory | DDR3-1333 9-9-9-24 | DDR3-1600 9-11-11-29 |
| Bandwidth (GB/s) | 74.56 | 77.55 |
| Speed Factor | 55.8 | 51.60 |
| AMD OverDrive Benchmark | DDR3-1333 9-9-9-24 | DDR3-1600 9-11-11-29 |
| Integer Computation | 26160 | 26520 |
| Floating Point Computation | 4169 | 4221 |
| Memory Speed | 1960 | 2840 |
| Cache Speed | 15750 | 15740 |
| System Performance | 8556 | 8731 |