G.SKILL
RipJaws Z F319200CL9Q 16GB MEMORY
Recommended Award
RRP: $629.99 | Website: http://www.gskill.com
Test Machine
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Intel Core i7 3960X
ASUS Rampage IV Extreme
Corsair Force GT 90GB SSD
Corsair AX1200
Windows 7 64-Bit
F
rom humble beginnings
GSkill have slowly
encroached into the realms
of enthusiast memory.
The release of an amazing
range of X79 memory kits
potentially furthers GSkill’s
push towards market
supremacy, but they’re not
quite there yet. The extreme
high end has long been
dominated by Corsair, but
GSkill are hoping their latest
2400 MHz 9-11-10-28 quad
channel memory kit might
have something to say about
that. While this isn’t GSkill’s
highest rated X79 kit, when
taking into consideration the
28 The OverClocker Issue 18 | 2012
timings, this is more than
likely the heaviest binned kit.
There is no doubting these
modules are designed for
serious speed and at the
default timings of 9-11-10-28
they don’t disappoint. We had
no trouble pushing this kit
past 2500 MHz fully stable,
and it was happy to clock
further to 2525 MHz for 32m
stability.
When we tightened the
CAS latency slightly to bring
the timings to 8-11-10-28
things changed dramatically
and the frequency dropped
right down to 2296 MHz.
This would indicate the new
generation of Hynix ICs,
which are found on most
of the high frequency quad
channel kits, are extremely
sensitive to CAS changes.
Fortunately in our further
testing, we determined that
for benchmarking on X79
you are significantly better
off running with higher
frequency and looser timings
than lowering the frequency
at all.
To bolster our evidence
that CAS has a huge impact
on frequency, we tightened
only the TRCD and found
we were able to reach 2248
MHz, with the resultant
timings of 8-10-10-28. While
this combination of timings
and frequency isn’t amazing
by P67 standards, keep
in mind we are pushing 4
sticks of memory and the
ICs are totally different than
the previous manufacture
favourite, PSC.
We tried tightening the
CAS latency further to 7 to
no avail, the system simply
wouldn’t boot. It was though
possible to tighten the TRCD
again to effective timings of
8-9-9-28 but at these tight