Memory overclocking can be accomplished in many ways. But first you have to ask yourself whether you want to overclock the memory itself or whether you would like to overclock the memory along with the front side bus of the processor. For this review, I was forced to choose both methods.
The Gigabyte P35-DS4 Rev 2.1 motherboard I was using only allowed me to overclock the memory itself to a 3.33 multiplier of the 333Mhz FSB one the E6750 Dual-Core CPU being used in this review. This resulted in an out-of-the-box overclock of 1111Mhz without any adjustment to the memory voltage. Everything was rock solid, but I knew this memory had some more in it and seeing the next step up in multiplier choice was 4.0x, I knew that would be well above what this memory could handle. A small test using that multiplier did have XP freezing on boot.
So I left the 3.33x multiplier and started upping the processor FSB more and more, and even more to increase the memory frequency. I passed 1150Mhz with no problems, then 1175Mhz without a sweat. At 1200Mhz I was starting to be in disbelief and thought there must be a mistake but after 3 hours or thrashing the memory through a Memtest86 test with zero errors, I started to creep up again to see if I could finally kit the overclocking ceiling. I passed 1225Mhz and after another 4 hours of testing finally hit the memory's ceiling at a staggering rock and rock solid 1233Mhz. To confirm, a Memtest86 test was conducted for 12 hours without a single error. One mhz above 1233 and errors did appear.
So with a final overclock of 167Mhz, I can say that I am quite impressed with this memory kit and through the excellent overclocking, I was able to overclock the CPU to 2.96Ghz from it stock 2.66 with a processor front side of 370Mhz and a 3.33Mhz multiplier.
You just have to love free performance improvements.
- Sisoft Sandra Lite XII Memory bandwidth Test
- AIDA32 Read/Write Bandwidth Test
- PCMark2005 Memory Benchmark
- 3DMark2006 1024x768 (CPU/Memory Limited)
- Cinebench 10 Multiple CPU Benchmark
- Cinebench 10 Multiple OpenGL Benchmark
Benchmarking Explained:
In this review I will be comparing the Crucial memory today in its stock 1066Mhz form, its 1111Mhz pure memory overclock and its max 1233Mhz cpu/memory combined overclock against the Corsair PC2-5400 kit. I know the Corsair kit is not in the same league as the Crucial kit, but this comparison is to allow the potential buyer seeing how upgrading their existing slower DDR2 to the fastest 1066Mhz and beyond will increase their system performance if their motherboard supports the faster memory.
