X-bit labs

First Look at Corsair Dominator TW3X4G1800C8DF G: 4GB DDR3-1800 SDRAM (page 4)

Category: Memory

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 04/25/2008 | 03:43 PM ]

We have also check out how well Corsair Dominator TW3X4G1800C8DF G can overclock with Command rate set to 1T. the maximum frequency when the system remained stable with these settings turned out a little lower, but nevertheless, very pleasing.

The memory could run not only at its nominal speed, but also at a higher 1836MHz frequency. It is interesting that the practical memory subsystem bandwidth in this case turned out even higher than at 1864MHz with 2T Command rate setting: the read speed increased to 11.2GB/s and the latency went down to 46.3ns.

We have also tried overclocking Corsair Dominator TW3X4G1800C8DF G kit in a few other modes. The complete description of the obtained results is given in the table below:

As we see, Corsair selected the most optimal combination of parameters for their new solution. By setting the timings to anything other than the default 8-8-8-24 doesn’t allow you to achieve any significantly better overclocking results. Even increasing the voltage beyond 1.8V has no effect. TW3X4G1800C8DF G modules cannot remain stable at 1800MHz with more aggressive timings than the default 8-8-8-24.

So, it turns out that Corsair Dominator TW3X4G1800C8DF G memory kit works perfectly well at frequencies close to the nominal 1800MHz, but cannot be overclocked a lot neither by setting less aggressive timings nor by increasing the operational voltage. From this standpoint it yields a little bit to the existing 2GB DDR3 SDRAM kits built on Micron chips, however, this is hardly a significant drawback taking into account twice the capacity of this kit.