Overclocking

Being a PC3-12800 kit means that we're dealing with a 1600MHz DDR one, which isn't all that quick by today's standards and is fairly usual when it comes to these larger 4GB modules. For the same reason as the lower speed, we also have more relaxed timings. In this case they rest at 9-9-9-24-2T. What's interesting is that G.Skill has achieved this with only 1.5v, which is much lower than the 1.65v we're used to seeing.

You can see the validation here.

Getting to that speed wasn't an issue, as we expected; we've seen our P55 test bed push capable memory much higher. Due to the low voltage, though, our hopes were high when it came to overclocking.

You can see the validation here.

With the voltage bumped up to the standard 1.65v that we're used to seeing and keeping the timings at the same 9-9-9-24-2T setup, we managed to squeeze a 200MHz DDR overclock out of the kit that resulted in a final clock speed of 1800MHz DDR.

The only problem we ran into was that we needed to move our memory divider and in turn ended up with a CPU speed a fair bit slower than the same kit at 1600MHz DDR. This was to no fault of G.Skills, or anyone else really; it's just that when using the same divider we couldn't achieve the 230+ BCLK we needed to get the CPU speed even higher without instability issues taking place.

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.