GSkill RipjawsZ PC3 17000 CL9 Quad Channel Memory Kit

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 3.77Ghz 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.  However, 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.

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.

As we have seen from previous memory reviews this is not all that uncommon and a good thing to look for when overclocking.