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'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 Viper Xtreme Division 2 PC3-15000 2x4GB, the short answer is a simple 'no'. I loosened the latencies to 11-11-11-33 with no luck at DDR3-2133, so I just resorted to seeing how the latencies scale at stock speeds. As shown in our screenshot above, after extended stability testing, I found our particular kit to be perfectly stable at DDR3-1866 9-10-9-24 1T. That is a decent improvement over its 9-11-9-27 specification.
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To reflect upon the introduction of this review, one of the reasons why I have wasted 90% of the paragraph talking about practically irrelevant material is simple: If you have written enough RAM reviews like I have, it is hard to find anything interesting to talk about that can effectively lead into the topic. However, just because the Patriot Viper Xtreme Division 2 PC3-15000 2x4GB has nothing interesting to start with, does not mean there are no surprises to conclude by. With no questions about its performance as demonstrated in the last seven pages, let's spend some time talking about its overclocking potential. Sure, it will not step up a notch to DDR3-2133. We did not expect it, especially coming from DDR3-1866 RAM at modest 9-11-9-27 latencies. But much to my surprise, we have actually quite a bit of potential under the hood when we want to tighten up the timings. Keeping it at stock 1.65V actually allowed us to run it at 9-10-9-24 Prime95 stable for extended periods of time. Now that is one thing I did not expect! For about $90 at press time, the Patriot Viper Xtreme Division 2 PC3-15000 2x4GB is a pair of memory that overclocks reasonably well under a medium profile, copper plated "aircraft grade" aluminum hybrid heatspreader. The only thing I didn't like about it is the glue used to attach the modules itself to the heatspreaders, but I don't think many people are going to take apart their RAM anyway. At the end of the day, it is certainly not the lowest priced RAM in the market today, but sometimes, you just got to pay a little more for better hardware.
Patriot provided this product to APH Networks for the purpose of evaluation.
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 Viper Xtreme Division 2 PC3-15000 2x4GB DDR3 memory kit combines chips that overclock reasonably well, and a set of heatspreaders that is better quality than the competition.
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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
