Test Setup

Performance & Overclocking

The first thing done, when testing this memory is simply running it at the rated speed. This meant setting the OCZ memory to 1800 MHz in the BIOS. The only way to achieve this, is to set the FSB to 450 MHz, so you will have to have a board that can manage such high settings. On the ASUS P5K3 Deluxe, the memory ran like a charm at the rated settings. The next step was to increase the memory voltage to the maximum supported - 2.05V in this case. With this we managed to get 1860 MHz at the same CL rating. So you still have a bit of headroom with this kit. Lowering the CL rating to 9 or 10 only gave us an extra 10-15 MHz, so we were not able to break 2000 MHz with these sticks.

The next step is used to find the tightest timings the memory will work at. This is CL 5-4-4-12. At this rating we managed to squeeze 1198 MHz out of these at 2.05V, which is quite impressive. The last benchmarking process is done by going through each CL rating and benchmarking certain milestones like 1333 MHz or 1600 MHz and benchmarking the maximum the memory is capable of at standard voltage and 2.05V. The CPU mulitplier was dropped from 7 to 6x as soon as a FSB above 400 MHz was required. This is done to make sure, that the processor does not become the bottleneck.





The voltage scaling graph shows some great properties. The OCZ DDR3 memory is very balanced, as both a higher CL setting and a raise in voltage result in a speed improvement. Only at CL7 do we see an invisible wall, which the memory did not seem to be able to break, no matter how much we set the voltage at. Please note that each individual module overclocks different, the results here can only be seen as an indicator of performance.