For the purpose of testing I will be using the Patriot G2 kit and all subsequent Sandy Bridge memory on the ASUS P8P67 motherboard, using the Intel 2500K. Our database is now growing for Sandy Bridge memory reviews, so over time there will be more memory to compare against. But for now, we will be testing versus OCZ Reaper, G.Skill RipjawsX, Kingston HyperX Special Editions and the recently reviewed G.Skill SNIPER.



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 only set margins to move in because of the divider that is set. So available we have 1066MHz / 1600MHz / 1866MHz / 2133MHz / 2400MHz. In essence we have little room to experiment with, but lets see what we can do.

So to begin with I overclocked the kit. With the intention of pushing the memory frequency up to the first milestone - 1866MHz. It's always a good idea to loosen the CAS timings when overclocking so that nothing affects moving up to the specified frequency. So I slackened the timings to 10-10-10-24. I had no problems at all with these settings so with CL10 being quite high for CAS latency I decided to try for CL9 but the G2 kit would not budge, no matter what combination of figures I used. I even tried nudging the voltage up to 1.7v but this would not encourage a CL9 1866MHz overclock, so in the end I had to settle for CL19 at 1866MHz.

The next objective was to modify the CAS timings at the stock memory frequency of 1600MHz. The idea here is to get the timings as tight as possible and the lowest ratings that I could settle on were 8-9-8-24 @ 1.65v. It's good to see that I was able to improve the CAS latency to CL8.

With the performance modifications being established I was then able to begin benchmarking. So the G2 kit will be tested in CL10 with an overclock of 1866MHz , CL8 at 1600MHz and CL9 at 1600MHz (Stock). The results are on the proceeding pages. To summarise here are the settings we will be testing on the Patriot G2: