Corsair Dominator Platinum 2133Mhz Quad Channel Memory Review

As with all of our reviews we pit the default speed system against the overclocked one in a head to head byte match. The results of this are below. The effective overclock here is 3.99Ghz with a BCLK of 105Mhz for a resulting memory clock of 2240Mhz.  That is a modest overclock of 107Mhz over the rated speed using stock voltages.

Overclocking memory with the Sandy Bridge E is highly dependent on the quality of your CPU, if your CPU doesn't like to overclock then reaching high memory frequencies can be extremely difficult.  Despite having an Extreme Edition Core i7 3960X we discovered that our processor is very fickle when it comes to BCLK adjustments.  With some work we were able to get the processor to run at 132BCLK which works out to be roughly 107BCLK x 1.25.  Sadly those multiplier settings were not stressing the memory modules quite the same as XMP+105BCLK so we went with the lower spec.

Overall the results are about what we had expected,  The modules would not run at 2400Mhz using the memory multiplier and did not react well to timing adjustments but they did respond to straight BCLK adjustments and would accept extra voltage, even though we didn't need any for these tests.

These modules were also very receptive to timing adjustments and allowed us to run at CL8 provided that the memory voltage was raised to 1.65v.  According to the performance numbers the lower CAS number did increase performance but it is our opinion that running overclocked at stock voltages was better the better option.