Overclocking

What we tend to find with PC3-12800 kits is that there's a little bit more breathing room when compared to PC3-16000 modules which tend to be closer to their limit. So with that said, we took the time to see what kind of overclock we could achieve with the modules.

We decided to leave the modules at their recommended 9-9-9-24 settings and since 1.65v is the recommended max from Intel, we left our voltage around that. To be more specific, it was at 1.66v since our GIGABYTE board doesn't allow for 1.65v but 1.64v and 1.66v only.

What all this resulted in was a clock speed of 1728MHz DDR or a 128MHz increase from the stock 1600MHz clock the kit carries with it. We'll see what this does for overall performance in just a minute.

Important Editor Note: Our maximum overclocking result is the best result we managed in our limited time of testing the memory. Due to time constraints we weren't able to tweak the motherboard to the absolute maximum and find the highest possible FSB, as this could take days to find properly. We do however spend at least a few hours overclocking every motherboard to try and find the highest possible overclock in that time frame. You may or may not be able to overclock higher if you spend more time tweaking, or as new BIOS updates are released. "Burn-in" time might also come into play if you believe in that.