At CES we heard rumours that OCZ Technology was getting out of the game and a few days later it was confirmed. To be honest, it came as no surprise; not because they aren't good at memory, although they have indeed been quiet in the RAM department over the past 12 months. The thing is, though, they're just killing it in the SSD market.
Over here in Australia you see people buying the OCZ line-up of SSD drives constantly and it comes as no surprise. Imagine what they're going to be capable of when they concentrate 100% of the company on that segment instead of having a bit split at the moment.
Today we're looking at a Platinum XTE Series kit from OCZ and it's actually the first time we've seen a kit from this series. To get a bit more specific, we're dealing with a PC3-16000 or 2000MHz DDR 4GB kit that comes in with a 9-9-9-24-1T @ 1.65v setup.
Like most of the kits we've looked at recently, this one doesn't carry with it anything extra outside the modules themselves when it comes to the package, and for the most part it seems to help keep the cost down with the kit coming in at only 94.99 USD
Because of the divider option on our P67 Extreme6 ASRock board, 2000 MHz DDR is a little harder to get as we can go for either 1866MHz DDR or 2133MHz DDR. First we aimed for 2133MHz DDR and with no surprise we didn't have any joy. Instead we opted for 1866MHz and pushed the BCLK to 104.
With the settings at that we ended up with a memory clock of 1941MHz DDR which is just a little shy of the default 2000MHz DDR. You can see that CPU-Z validation here. Our intention is to get it to at least 2000MHz DDR, but since this was the first booted number we got we're using this as our starting point. Now to check out performance.
Under AIDA64 we ended up with Read / Write numbers of 20,991 MB/s / 18,660 MB/s, Copy speed of 23,194 MB/s and latency of 41.9ns. Looking at SiSoftware Sandra, our memory bandwidth numbers are 25,360 MB/s for Integer and 25,400 MB/s for Float.
Since our BCLK options are quite limited as we've mentioned a number of times and 105 BCLK didn't want to post, we thought we'd move to 2133MHz DDR and then work the BCLK backwards.
Since our lowest option is 95 on the BCLK, that would bring our memory down to 2026MHz DDR. Unfortunately we couldn't get it to boot, even when we loosened the timings a little.
At 1941MHz DDR which is just below the default MHz of the kit we don't see any surprises with strong performance at that speed. What it all comes down to, though, is that not just this kit, but 2000MHz memory in general isn't a good option for the P67 chipset due to the divider situation.
This kit is of course better suited to the P55 platform which doesn't have an issue with getting to 2000MHz with just dividers. The P67 platform might prefer the OCZ Gold Series kit we've got here that carries a default clock of 2133MHz DDR, so keep an eye out for that review soon.
The OCZ Platinum XTE Series PC3-16000 4GB kit isn't a bad kit, it's just not suited for the P67 platform unless you wanted to run it at lower speeds, which really we don't know why you would. However, if you're looking for something to throw in your P55 machine that doesn't cost much, this is a decent looking kit.