Page 10 - Overclocking and Conclusion
Ever since Intel's second generation Core processors hit the market, it really made a reviewer's job a lot easier. For the lazy bunch of us, overclocking memory used to involve fine tuning of the front side bus or base clock of the processor to precisely measure the maximum attainable RAM speed. Since Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge's base clock is practically locked down, and for practical purposes, capped voltage at 1.65V, the only practical way of testing this is to see if the tested modules can notch up an entire step. With the Patriot Intel Extreme Masters PC3-17000 2x4GB, the short answer is a simple 'no'. It is highly unlikely that DDR3-2133 RAM can jump to DDR3-2400, but to be honest, we are not losing a whole lot anyway. However, I found the stock 11-11-11-27 latencies to be a bit conservative. To see if we can squeeze a little more from this product, I bumped the voltage to 1.65V, and managed to reduce the timings to 10-11-10-27. It is not a big deal, but hey -- any performance increase is good increase.
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As suggested by its name, the Patriot Intel Extreme Masters PC3-17000 2x4GB is the official RAM of the games it is named after. Now I don't know about you, but I have never really been captivated by any sort of product affiliation or endorsements by celebrities -- all it means to me is it probably costs more in the end, because I am paying for the advertising. Actually, more often than not, it is just a regular run-of-the-mill product with better branding. When I first got my hands on these Patriot Intel Extreme Masters limited edition RAM for review a few months ago, my only thought was, "Wow, cool heatspreaders" -- but that is about it. No excitement. No emotions. However, once I plugged it into my computer and started benchmarking last week, the numbers spoke for itself. Despite being 'only' DDR3-2133, it performed nearly as well, if not better, than the higher clocked G.Skill TridentX F3-2400C10D-8GTX 2x4GB at DDR3-2400. Surprising, isn't it? The good news does not stop here. Priced at approximately $53 at press time, it is also a price tag the common man can afford. With some latency tuning headroom as the icing on the cake, what's not to love? Well, the higher profile heatspreaders may interfere with your CPU heatsink, and the XMP settings are not correctly programmed, at least on our unit. Other than that, the Patriot Intel Extreme Masters PC3-17000 2x4GB is a set of high performance memory for the masses.
Patriot Memory provided this product to APH Networks for the purpose of evaluation.
APH equal.balance Award
Since April 30, 2007, Number Ratings have been dropped for all CPUs, motherboards, RAM, SSD/HDDs, and graphics cards. This is to ensure the most appropriate ratings are reflected without the inherent limits of using numbers. Everything else will continue using the Number Rating System.
More information in our Review Focus.
The Patriot Intel Extreme Masters PC3-17000 2x4GB is a dual channel kit that delivers awesome performance at an affordable price.
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Page Index
1. Introduction, Packaging, Specifications
2. A Closer Look, Installation, Test System
3. Benchmark: AIDA64 CPU
4. Benchmark: AIDA64 FPU
5. Benchmark: AIDA64 Memory
6. Benchmark: PCMark 7
7. Benchmark: 3DMark 11
8. Benchmark: PassMark PerformanceTest 7.0
9. Benchmark: SuperPI 1M, Cinebench R11.5
10. Overclocking and Conclusion
