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 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.



I got into Windows with these sticks at 3600 MHz, and all other XMP settings remained the same. However, even the slightest load caused the system to crash. Increasing voltages (1.4 V on the memory, 1.3 V VCCIO, and 1.35 V VCCSA) did not improve the situation. Stepping down to 3500 MHz yielded much better results without the need to increase any voltages over the XMP standard. 300 MHz is not a bad result, especially at the default voltage. I did also try tightening timings down to CL14, which has become so popular, but had no luck.