TheOverclocker Issue 29 | Page 22

AVEXIR Blitz 1.1 1600MHz DDR3 8GB Kit RRP: $129.99 | Website: www.avexir.com Test Machine • • • • INTEL Core i7 4770K GIGABYTE Z87X-OC (F8) INTEL 730 480GB SSD Cooler Master Silent Pro M2 1500W • Windows 7 64-bit SP1 S ingle sided Hnyix MFR memory. What could anyone possibly want from such sticks? Moreover, they are 1600MHz sticks as well. Surely these are not for the discerning overclocking who demands nothing but the best hardware and is more than likely willing to pay or at the very least bin for such parts. Well, that is the theory anyway and something that we wish was true for every overclocker out there regardless of experience or capability and perhaps even resources. Sadly this isn’t the case and the truth is that most beginners and people 22 The OverClocker Issue 29 | 2014 just getting into overclocking can only afford memory at this price and lower. A lot of us who may have gone on to LN2 overclocking started this on our gaming machines which would more times than not have memory at this price rather than the high end 2600Mhz and higher kits we take for granted. With this AVEXIR Blitz 1.1 1600 MHz kit, upon discovering that it is MFR, we immediately set about trying to see just how far we could push the memory. It is only the most obvious thing to try and do given that not too long ago, the only thing we did with Haswell CPUs and motherboards was push memory clock frequencies. This is where we were able to reach speeds of just over 2500MHz for the kit. That is mighty impressive for budget 1600MHz DIMMs. That’s almost 1GHz above the standard clock speed without the use of LN2. However, that speed was anything but stable and thus we settled for the frequencies you see in the table above. Timings could be run relatively tight at 1600MHz but that frequency was never going to satisfy the systems need for more bandwidth, thus the best performance is going to be at 2133MHz even though some sacrifices have to be made to the primary timings. You’re not going to get much more by tuning secondary timings on this kit and even with a low TWCL setting, you’ll only introduce instability so that avenue is lost to you. Given that you can buy fairly generic 2133MHz memory kits from just about anywhere. You may be wondering why anyone would settle for the AVEXIR Blitz set for this kind of spend. The answer may seem ridiculous but it’s purely because this is amongst the best looking sets of memory you can buy. In fact, we would wager that these are