EDITOR’S CHOICE
AWARD
CORSAIR DOMINATOR PLATINUM
2666C10 Quad Channel Kit
RRP: $359.99 | Website: www.corsair.com
Test Machine
Intel Core i7 3770K
ASRock Z77 OC-Formula
Kingston HyperX 3K 240GB
CoolerMaster Silent Pro M2
1500W
Windows 7 64-bit SP1 /XP SP3
P
erformance kits are all
the rage of late. With
the imminent release of
Haswell CPUs and the related
chipset, rumour is that these
high speed kits will become
more useful than they are now.
Since we have no firsthand
experience with the platform,
we can’t comment on how true
that is, however what we can
have some meaningful insight
into, is how these sets perform
on the current platforms, and
in particular where Ivy-Bridge
is concerned.
Before we delve into
how this set performs, it’s
important to note that with
memory above 2400MHz
especially, it’s more chance
22 The OverClocker Issue 21 | 2012
than anything else that you
have a CPU with the right IMC
and memory that can match
it. So do not look to such a
kit and expect every single
Ivy-Bridge CPU to be able
to reach these speeds. We
ourselves have come across
several CPU samples that had
IMC’s that were not capable
of speeds past 2,700MHz and
we are more than confident
in claims we’ve heard of
CPUs not going much past
2,500MHz. So be aware that
there are no guarantees
with such kits. We do though
suspect anyone buying this
set should be fairly clued up
on their CPUs capabilities.
This particular 2,666MHz
set is what we might
consider the “mid-range”
of the series as CORSAIR
does offer a 2,400MHz and
2,800MHz kit, with timings
appropriately tuned for each.
As a compromise between
price and rating, this strikes
a decent balance between
the two, especially given the
diminishing list of compatible
CPUs as you scale upwards
in memory frequencies. The
2,666MHz guarantees in some
ways prolific ICs. SAMSUNG
30nm chips are the order of
the day, and these have shown
to clock well before so you
should have suspected some
good overclocking headroom
from this set already.
Our testing started from
2,400MHz all the way to
2,933MHz. We could validate
3,000MHz and run a number
of benchmarks at that
frequency, but it just wasn’t
stable for anything other than
that. The 3GHz mark is great
for showing high numbers
but ultimately not useable
right now for any benchmarks
for the vast majority of
overclockers. For that, as
stated earlier, we’ll have
to wait for the successive
platform. 2,933MHz was
pretty much the same,
offering a little more
stability, at the cost of actual
performance
We were and remain fairly
impressed with this set. It’s