Corsair Memory, a leading producer of advanced memory modules, announced Thursday that it had managed to overclock memory sub-system of AMD Phenom II X6 microprocessor to 2287.6MHz. The achievement shows potential of Corsair’s latest Dominator GTX4 memory modules, however, actual performance benefits of such overclock may not be worth the effort.

Using an AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition central processing unit, Asus Crosshair IV Formula motherboard, Corsair Hydro-series H50 microprocessor cooler, and a pair of Corsair Dominator GTX4 memory DIMMs with Airflow memory fan, Corsair has managed to achieve the world-record memory frequency of 2287.6MHz with CL9 timing. Independent overclockers yet have not achieved memory frequencies of higher than 2GHz on AMD Phenom II platforms.

Unfortunately, according to Corsair, at the frequency of 2287.6MHz SuperPi 1M ran into errors in the last iteration. Dropping the memory frequency to 2271.6MHz allowed SuperPi 1M to be run at a time of 18.486 seconds. Considering that SuperPi 1M is not exactly a useful tool and the fact that Corsair utilized Nvidia GeForce 6600 GT graphics card (launched in 2004), the overclockers did not run any video game tests so to determine performance benefits of nearly 2.30GHz memory speed operation on AMD Phenom II X6.

Corsair did not reveal the speed of memory controller and level-three cache of AMD Phenom II X6 1090T BE processor. If memory controller frequency multiplier was not changed, then its clock-speed could be as high as 2.86GHz. However, Corsair did note that it experimented with various timings, sub timings, voltages, multiple processors and various frequencies, hence, actual clock-speed of memory controller could be lower than 2860MHz and that means lower impact of memory overclocking on performance.

“The new Phenom II X6 CPUs offer a quantum leap in overclockability for the AMD platform. The combination of the new CPU core and Corsair’s most aggressively sorted DIMMs results in some truly amazing memory performance,” said Jim Carlton, vice president of marketing at Corsair.

Tags: Corsair, Dominator, AMD, Phenom, Thuban