DDR2 is fading rapidly, especially with the introduction of the Core i7 architecture, there’s now more reason than ever to make the upgrade to a DDR3 board. With the introduction of the Core i7, this likely means that DDR3 prices will start to fall as the ram becomes more common and in the mainstream and in use in more systems.
Today I’ve got a set of DDR3 ram from Corsair, it’s the XMS3 DHX PC3-12800 Ram or 1600Mhz ram. The DHX stand for Dual-path Heat Exchange that the ram features in the form of essentially a three piece heatspreader, one of each side over the ram ship and one between that actually helps keep the PCB cool as well. I ran the set through my battery of tests and it fully dominated all of them, it even easily runs at a lower latency of Cas8 which netted me a nice performance gain as well. So read on…
No unboxing video for ram, there’s not much to look at really.. but we’ve got box shots etc for you. The Corsair PC3-12800 comes in a common clamshell package with a cardboard insert with specs and features listed
This is is DHX ram, Dual Path Exchange which means it has extra large heatsinks and a dedicated PCB heatsink as well to make sure everything remains cool. The DHX heatspreaders do add quite a bit to the height of the ram, so it might not work well is all cases where it’s cramped or a large CPU cooler is involved.
Specifications:
As you can see running the Corsair at lower timings nets a nice increase in performance overall, especially in OpenGL and Rendering with 2 CPUs.
Next up we’ve got Crystalmark, it’s a nice whole system benchmarking suite.
As you can se yet again Corsair dominates over the other ram, with the lower timings netting a nice performance gain.
Next up I ran Crysis DX9 and DX10 benchmark, 2 passes, 2x AA at a resolution of 1024×768, it’s an 8600GTS so it can’ exactly handle Crysis well, so ignore the actual framerates, it’s just for comparison purposes.
We see a very slight gain but not much at all, nothing spectacular at all, maybe if I used a different card I might have netted better gains.
Now we’ve got several tests from SiSoft Sandra 2009, they’re synthetic tests but they work for a nice comparison.
we’ve got SiSoft Sandra 2009 Results:
SiSoft Sandra Cache and Memory Benchmark
-Cache/memory Bandwidth GB/s – Higher is better
-Speed Factor – Lower is better i.e. less difference between processor cache speed and memory speed.
Here again we see some nice performance from this set of ram, pretty much dominating the other sets.
Next we’ve got CPU Arithmetic test:
-Higher scores are better
In this test we see pretty equal scores with the Corsair actually falling a bit behind..
Next we’ve got CPU Multimedia Test:
-Higher is better
Pretty much equal all around…
Now we’ve got Memory Bandwidth Test
-Higher is Better
At the lower latency of Cas8, we see the Corsair easily takes the lead, while the Cas9 lags a bit behind. There’s really no reason no to run this set at the lower latency…
and finally we’ve got SiSoft Sandra Memory Latency:
-Lower is better
as expected the Cas8 easily shows the best performance here… Corsair pretty much dominated all of my testing here…
As for overclocking I could hit 1700Mhz with this set of ram but no higher at all, and there wasn’t much of a difference in performance really. I believe the set will go higher, but I’m limited with CPU as it is a 266Mhz FSB CPU, and to hit the 1600Mhz I had to bump the FSB up already to 400Mhz, and even with the CPU multiplier down to 6x it was still overclocking the CPU, and it’s not a very overclockable CPU sadly, and it wasn’t the cooling I was using a TRUE Copper CPU cooler, even with a large voltage bump the CPU wouldn’t budge anymore…
According to Corsair documentation, testing and other reviews I’ve seen, this ram easily hit 1800Mhz and even 2000mhz, apparently I need to get a new DDR3 board and CPU that will overclock better and allow me a more extensive set of settings to change in the BIOS… but from my testing even at the lower settings the Corsair set is a decent set of ram.
Conclusion:
The results pretty much speak for themselves, the Corsair DDR3 1600Mhz kit is something to be reckoned with in terms of performance and even looks.
This kit can easily run at a lower latency of Cas8, with the overall timings of 8-8-8-20 at stock voltages, as at those timings there is a nice performance gain so there is no reason not to run at those timings.
Pros:
Works at lower latency
Overclocks well
Excellent performance
SLI certified
Looks cool
Cons:
Large profile, might not fit with all configurations
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