Corsair DDR3 CL8 1600MHz XMS3 Dominator 6GB Kit

Introduction

Bye bye DDR2, you have served us all very well and it’s been nice knowing you. Sadly, all good things come to an end. An end that is if you intend on upgrading to Intel’s latest CPU. Intel has finally cut it’s support for DDR2, at least for the new Skt 1366 format. If you cannot bare the thought of relinquishing your faith toward DDR2 then maybe this review is perhaps not for you as the order of the day is DDR3 and todays special – 6GB of Corsairs finest Dominator series ram.

The maturity of DDR3 has helped pave the way for this new breed of  high speed kits that even at a tasty 1600mhz are not the highest available bandwidth with 1866+mhz on the horizon. Today however, we will be sampling the triple channel dominator kit. The Dominator 1600mhz kit comes in two guises, C8 and C9. Corsair have aimed the C8 kit at the ‘Ultra Enthusiast’ while the C9 caters for the ‘mainstream enthusiast’. Never being ones to disappoint, we managed to secure the ‘Ultra Enthusiast kit’ for your pleasure.

With Core i7 comes new architecture and a new memory controller. No longer is the memory latency stifled by the use of a middleman (North bridge), the memory controller is now on die which has also allowed an expansion from Dual to Triple channel. Of course DDR3 does not need to be run in triple channel, much the same as DDR2 didn’t need to run in dual channel but for optimum performance it is highly recommended that you run DDR3 in triple channel mode.

Let’s hear what Corsair have to say about their latest DDR3 kit:

Specification

Enough of the small talk, let’s take a look at the kit itself…