Corsair Vengeance DDR3 12GB 1600MHz Review

👤by David Mitchelson Comments 📅06-12-10
Testing & Overclocking

Being a triple channel, this kit is designed with the Intel X58 chipset in mind. In order for us to determine overall performance of the Corsair Vengeance, I will be comparing the kit to a 12GB Kingston HyperX DDR3 kit that has similar ratings to the kit under review today. A stock frequency of 1600MHz and latencies of 9-9-9-27. We will be comparing the Vengeance kit in a vast range of benchmarks covering synthetic tests such as 3DMark, SANDRA and AIDA64 and then in the real-world environment of gaming featuring an array of recent titles.

Stock performance will be reported, the tightest timings will also be reported at the stated frequency of 1600MHz as well as the maximum overclock . CPU clock speed will be restricted to the default value of 2.6GHz in order to focus on the subject at hand, isolating those memory modules - we don't want anything to hinder the performance.



System Components

CPU Intel Core i7 920
Motherboard ASUS Rampage III Formula
Graphics XFX HD5870
Memory
12GB Corsair Vengeance 1600MHz @ 9-9-9-24
12GB Kingston HyperX 1600MHz @ 9-9-9-27
HDD Kingston SSDNow V+ 128GB
PSU Antec Signature 650W

Overclocking

So this is the part that many of the readers will be homing in on. The stock performance of memory is one thing but since the market is now geared towards enthusiast overclocking most of the kits on the shelves now offer a varying degree of overclockability.

I began by nudging the frequency of the Vengeance kit up into the 1900MHz+ but I could not get it to settle at any of the timings. At the very least I did not want to drop into CAS10 as this is quite slack. I tried many combinations of multiplier, BCLK and timings whilst keeping the voltage at 1.65v. Eventually I managed to settle at just under 1900MHz - 1854MHz by using a multiplier of 14 and BCLK of 185. I stress tested various timings some proved unfruitful but eventually I found the sweet spot to be 9-10-10-28. Almost 19% on the overclock is a commendable and an achievement in itself.

To show things from a different angle I then kept the frequency at 1600MHz, in a quest to determine the tightest timings possible. Again, in my attempts many timings failed but I eventually found myself at 8-9-8-26.

This shows how flexible the Vengeance kit is. I know for a fact that this series is capable of exceeding 2000MHz from the 1600MHz stock mark but something was holding me back.

In the proceeding pages, we will see the performance offered by the Vengeance kit at stock, tightened, and overclocked settings. This should expose some interesting results.



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