Pushing For Speed

With testing out of the way, I endeavored to see if these sticks had any headroom. I left the voltages and timings at their XMP defaults and started increasing the frequency divider until the system failed to boot. At that point, I backed it down to the last bootable configuration and did some basic stability testing using MemTest64.



I was able to get 3400 MHz out of this kit with all other XMP settings at their default. However, it failed MemTest, so I had to back it down to 3300 MHz to get it entirely stable. Like many recent kits, pushing past that proved difficult. Raising voltages did not yield better results (highest tested: DRAM: 1.5 V, VCCSA: 1.35 V, and VCCIO: 1.3 V).

This is a little disappointing, but not entirely surprising. Dual-rank memory sticks often struggle to clock as high as single-rank sticks. I would have liked to see a little more out of the NOX RGB, and as always with overclocking, your mileage will vary depending on the board, quality of your processor's memory controller, and each memory kit.