If you happen to have one
of these boards (you can’t
know until you try a high bin
set and find out) then you’re
better off with 2,666MHz kits
and then trying your luck at
reaching higher frequencies.
At worst you’ll get what
you paid for and if you’re
fortunate, you’ll be able to
reach frequencies much
higher without having to do
too much tuning to get there.
This 16GiB kit is what I
would consider the
minimum required
frequency for DDR4
platforms, no perhaps
2,400MHz. The reason is that
frequencies lower than this
will not yield you much
performance gains over the
X79 platform at all. If you
are the current owner of a
4930K, a semi decent X79
motherboard and 2,400MHz
memory. Simply moving to a
5820K,
the same memory frequency
and a new motherboard
will yield you little to no
performance gains at all.
If anything you’ll just lose
out on PCI-Express lanes.
As such, if you’re going to
make the move it’s best
to do it with at least the
vastly improved memory
overclocking on the X99
platform in mind.
To that end, when I started
with this RipJaws4 kit, I had
little to no expectations of
it. Remember as well that
at the time, many of the
motherboards that were
made available for testing
had some teething problems
thus, you’ll have to look at
this review as a worst case
scenario when it comes to
performance and frequency
scaling. Right now, the same
motherboards and this very
same kit will produce better
performance and I’ve no
doubt that the overclocking
will have improved
immensely as well.
Even with such limitations,
right of the bat, 2,666MHZ
was as easy as pie, simply
loading the XMP profile,
saving and restarting the
system. No problems there
as there shouldn’t be. That
isn’t interesting though and
what most of us will want
to find out is how far the
memory can go safely. By
safely I mean at voltages set
to 1.35V and no higher. You
should keep in mind though
that most motherboards will
apply a little more voltage
what you set. So even if you
set 1.35V in the BIOS you’re
likely to get anything from
1.36 to sometimes 1.38V.
This shouldn’t destroy
Issue 33 | 2015 The OverClocker 29