DDR3 memory has definitely been developing into a mainstream standard in the past few months, as witnessed by the constant price drop and nearing the prices of DDR2. Having in mind that Intel has already presented its P55 platform to the market, it’s hardly surprising that faster and better memory kits for it appear all the time. Unlike the X58 platform, P55 was designed for dual-channel memory access, which “revived” dual-channel memory kits for Intel platforms.
Faster Than CPUs A Few Years Back
We’ve entertained ourselves by testing three memory kits aimed at different user categories, signed by reputed manufacturers. We’ve been dealing with two accessible Mushkin kits and an exclusive Kingston HyperX kit made with overclockers in mind.
We’ve tested the kits on the P55 platform, using an ASUS Maximus III Extreme motherboard and an Intel Core i5 750 processor with a solid overclock margin, so that we be able to suck out the very last bit of performance from the memory.
As far as voltages are concerned, the upper limit was 1.65 V, because that’s the limit as specified by Intel, and our desire was to see how the kits would deal with the situation where the memory controller in the CPU is fully secure. Also, we’ve used the same memory and CPU multiplier for all kits – for the CPU, the value was set to 18x, and the memory was working at effectively 10x the clock of BCLK.
