Test System

Initial Setup

As you can tell by the pictures, these modules are a bit tall, and they do stand 54.79 mm high. You can remove the light bar to lower their height a little bit; however, I could not find the proper Allen Key amongst the tools I own. I guess I need to take a trip to the hardware store! I first installed the sticks into an X79 rig, to see how they'd fare on a platform offering BCLK adjustments. As you can see in the picture, these modules were too tall for me to install the lower fan onto my trusty Noctua NH-C14 cooler, so these sticks may have issues with some larger aftermarket coolers.


I was very happy with the esthetic the Corsair Doninator Platinum sticks offer, as they look pretty damn slick installed into a board. Pick the right board and cooler, and you've got yourself one super-sexy rig for sure! I know what you're thinking...does the Dominator logo light up too? Sadly I must report that it does not. :( Maybe the logo on the add-on light-bars will. I've got to ask Corsair about that for sure!


I installed this Dominator Platinum 2666 MHz kit on a Z77 board since that is what it really is intended for, and they make an even more impressive statement there than they do on X79 Express products. On Z77 Express products, the four DIMMs form a solid metal wall that covers the DIMM slots, with only a millimeter or so separating the sticks from each other. They make a great match with the Gigabute Z77X-UP5 TH board pictured above, and I wouldn't mind slapping them into an ASUS Sabertooth board, either.


First boot, after enabling XMP in the BIOS, was no problem at all with my trusty i7 3770K, with both booting in at 2666 MHz, which was really a big surprise to me. I really did not expect to be able to boot at all, and booting 2666 MHz with four sticks was really unexpected, since there have been many reports on the "intarnets" of people not being able to get 2400 MHz with some CPUs. However, like any high-end and expensive kit should, this kit fired right up for me, and completed my stability testing and benchmarking without any hiccups at all. As always, I've included a MemTweakIt screenshot, allowing you to see the timings that were used throughout the testing.


Once they are installed and powered up, the light bars give off a soft white glow that just barely highlights the fins, much more subdued than what I was expecting. In fact, the light bar isn't even as bright as the Corsair Airflow Pro Parametric display installed above the Dominator Platinum modules in the second image.