For the purpose of testing I will be using the G.Skill kit and all subsequent Sandy Bridge memory on the ASUS P8P67 motherboard, using the Intel 2500K . As this is the beginning of our Sandy Bridge memory reviews, I will be testing against an OCZ Reaper kit with similar ratings. Obviously, over time we will have a larger database and more memory to compare against but right now we will concentrate on a versus style comparison.



Overclocking

With BCLK being fixed on the Sandy Bridge platform this has now altered the way we can overclock. Overclocking power with Sandy Bridge is concentrated on the CPU rather than memory. We do not have the flexibility we once had by changing the BCLK in order to move the frequencies in small increments, instead we have a certain margin to move in because of the divider that is set. So available we have 1600MHz / 1866MHz / 2133MHz / 2400MHz. So we have little room to experiment with, but lets see what we can do.

So to begin with I loosened the timings to 9-9-9-24, set the DRAM voltage to 1.6v (from 1.5v) and nudged the memory frequency up to 2111MHz. The system did POST but once in Windows I repeatedly experienced BSOD after BSOD. So this was a distinct no go. I felt that moving the timings to an even looser setting of 10 would be fruitless so I moved to the 1866MHz point with 9-9-9-24 set and this was stable even with 3DMark 11 being run. So from this point I began tightening things up. Ultimately I reached 8-9-8-24 with 1866MHz @ 1.6v. Quite impressive!

With the memory frequency overclock in place I then ran all of the benchmarks, recording the results which you will see over the proceeding pages. Next I set the kit to 1600MHz and worked on tightening the CAS timings even further than they were originally set to. After trial and error I eventually settled at 6-8-6-24 @ 1.5v which again is very impressive. So now over the proceeding pages are the results of all 3 ratings:

Stock: 1600MHz 7-8-7-24 @ 1.5v
Tight: 1600MHz 6-8-6-24 @ 1.5v
OC: 1866MHz 8-9-8-24 @ 1.6v