GSKill TridentX 2666Mhz CL11 Dual 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 4.1Ghz with a BCLK of 105Mhz for a resulting memory clock of 2730Mhz.  That is a modest overclock of 64Mhz over the rated speed.  

It would seem there isn't much headroom in these modules using stock voltages.

Overclocking memory with the Ivy Bridge 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.  We are quite lucky to have a Core i7 3770K that will do 112Mhz+ on a good motherboard leaving us to think that our TridentX modules were just not up to the task.  During our overclocking tests we discovered that 2740Mhz was the fastest these modules would run at stock voltages and in an attempt to get a slightly better CPU frequency we dropped the memory multiplier down to 26x and took advantage of the 105Mhz BCLK.

While the CPU is usually to blame when it comes to poor overclocking results we have to place some blame on the UP7 motherboard we used in this review for not being fully compatible with the GSKill TridentX modules running at 2666Mhz.  We had numerous issues getting the system to boot using the XMP profile and tracked the issue down to a faulty memory voltage bump.  After we manually set the DRAM voltage those problems went away.

Overall the results are about what we had expected and the modules responded well to straight BCLK adjustments and would accept extra voltage, even though we didn't use any for these tests.

These modules were also very receptive to timing adjustments provided the memory multiplier was reduced.  Given that we saw no increase in performance we opted not to include any of those results in this review.  As you can imagine, you pay a price premium for high-speed modules and we would recommend taking full advantage of the XMP profiles.