Geil Black Dragon PC3 12800 CAS 9 6GB Review

Testing:

To find out just how well a product performs, you have to test it in a real world environment so that you don't just blindly believe what the manufacturer says the product will do. Some are right on the money, while others fall somewhat short. On the other hand, there are products that exceed the manufacturer's specifications and will perform at a higher level than what the specifications lead you to believe. To find out what kind of performance the Geil modules deliver, I will be running them through the OverclockersClub suite of benchmarks to see how the performance compares to that of modules that are rated both lower and higher than the rated speed and timings of 9-9-9-27. The CPU is run at the default clock speed of 133 x 20 and the memory multiplier is increased to reach the rated speed of each set of modules. For the overclocking test, I will increase the bclock on the CPU to increase the clock speed of the Geil modules.

Testing Setup:

• CPU: Intel Core i7 920
• Motherboard: MSI X58 Eclipse
• Memory: Geil Black Dragon  PC 312800 9-9-9-24
• Video Card(s): NVIDIA GTX 260-216
• Power Supply: Mushkin 800 watt Modular Power Supply
• Hard Drive: Seagate 1 TB 7200.11 SATA
• Optical Drive: ASUS DVD-R
• OS: Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit SP1

Comparison Modules:

• Comparison Module #1: Kingston HyperX PC3-12800 3x2GB 1600MHz
• Comparison Module #2: Mushkin XP3 15000 3x2GB 8-9-8-24 1866MHz
• Comparison Module #3: Mushkin HP3-12800 3x2GB 9-9-9-24 1600MHz
• Comparison Module #4: Patriot Viper Series DDR3-10666 3x2GB 9-9-9-24 1333MHz

CPU-Z: This application shows us the settings that we have chosen in the BIOS. Items shown in this application include CPU speed and bus settings, motherboard manufacturer, BIOS revisions, memory timings, and SPD chip information.

Task Manager: We use this utility to show physical memory, kernel memory, page file, and processor usage.

Overclocking:

Overclocked settings:

• Processor: Intel Core i7 920 167x20 = 3340MHz
• Memory: Geil Black Dragon PC3 12800 9-9-9-28 2000MHz

The Geil Black Dragon PC3 12800 CAS 9 6GB kit of memory does not have any heatspreaders on them.  At first glimpse this would give you the impression that they are not going to be able to overclock very well at all.  This is not the case with this particular set of memory. As I begun overclocking the memory modules, I needed to bump the base clock of the i7 up a little bit to raise the operating frequency of the memory. I was able to raise the base clock of the processor all the way up to 167MHz, which allowed the memory to achieve 2000MHz, which is a 400MHz overclock. Now to achieve this, I did need to raise a few of the voltages. The memory voltages needed to be raised to 1.72v to keep them operating stable, QPI volts up to 1.44v and the IOH up to 1.22v. I could have tried to get the memory's frequency higher, however this would have required me to change to CAS 10, which in turn would have been quite counter productive.

The benchmarks used in this review include the following:

Benchmarks:

• CPU-Z Version 1.52
• Windows Task Manager
• PCMark Vantage
• SiSoft Sandra 2009
• Left 4 Dead