Pushing For Speed

With testing out of the way, I set about to see what kind of headroom the Ballistix Sport AT has. I left the voltages and timings alone (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.

Generally speaking, higher density (dual rank) memory has less headroom for overclocking since you have twice as many chances for a weak link in each stick. The Ballistix Sport AT actually proved to be very well suited to overclocking and exceeded my expectations by reaching 3800 MHz easily.



After testing to confirm that 3800 MHz was stable, I went back into the BIOS and started digging a little deeper to try to squeeze a little more out of the kit. I increased the DRAM voltage from 1.35 volts to 1.4 volts, VCCSA to 1.35 volts, and VCCIO to 1.3 volts, but couldn't get any more out of the kit. Still, 600 MHz is a solid overclock, especially at such reasonable voltages.

Not only that, but I was able to get the Ballistix Sport AT to boot and bench at 3200 MHz with significantly tighter timings (14-14-14-34) using the increased voltages from above. I found the overclocking results impressive, sporty even.