GeIL Black Dragon Dual Channel 4GB DDR3 Kit Review

👤by David Mitchelson Comments 📅03-11-10
Performance & Overclocking

Being a dual channel, this kit is designed for the Intel 1156 and AMD platform. In order for us to gage how well the Black Dragon performs, I will be comparing it at stock speeds against Mushkin EM3-10666 (9-9-9-24) 1333MHz and OCZ Black Edition PC3-12800 1600MHz (8-8-8-24) DDR3 kits and then overclocking it as far as it will allow me. CPU clock speed will be kept at the default of 2.8GHz so that all other parameters are taken out of the equation and the overclock can run freely without anything affecting it.

System Components
CPU AMD Phenom II X6 1055T 2.8GHz
Motherboard ASUS M4A89TD PRO
Graphics MSI 8800GTX
Memory
4GB Mushkin EM3-10666 1333MHz DDR3
4GB OCZ Black Edition PC3-12800 1600MHz
4GB GeIL Black Dragon PC3 12800 1600MHz
HDD Samsung Spinpoint 500GB SATA-II
PSU OCZ Fatal1ty 750W



Overclocking

This is the part that a lot of readers get excited about, and rightly so. If you are investing in a new memory kit you want to know how much performance you can squeeze out of the modules. Sadly though, it isn't good news. Originally I was sent a kit that was rated at 1800MHz and I could not get that kit past 1800MHz at all, I altered many variables in the hope that I might be able to get even the slightest overclock but the kit would not yield. That kit was sent back and another kit was sent out - today's 1600MHz kit.

With a new kit sent out, hope was rekindled but again I was let down. This kit would not budge from 1600MHz at all. I could tighten the timings ever so slightly to 8-9-9-28 but nothing else. Frequency overclock was a no go, even after altering different variables like the voltage. This was quite disheartening. I browsed over to another review site that reviewed the exact same kit and I discovered the same problem had befallen them: http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/geil_black__dragon/3.htm so I wasn't on my own. It seems that this kit is incapable of overclocking on the 1156 or AMD platform. Certainly on the 890FX that I am using it will not budge in the slightest.

Like the guys at Overclockers Club I was intrigued to find out if this kit behaves in the same manner whilst installed on an X58 board so I popped it into the ASUS Rampage III Formula. Here I was able to achieve big overclocks without any problems. 1866MHz (933MHz) @ 10-10-10-28 and 1911MHz (955MHz) @ 10-10-10-28.

So it seems this kit isn't liking the chipset on the M4A89TD PRO. But as Overclockers Club highlighted, the 1156 platform is also affected, and X58 board that I was able to get results on isn't even dual channel. Something is badly wrong here!

NOTE: different chipset drivers and BIOS updates were used to eliminate bugs.


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