G.Skill Trident DDR3-2500 4GB Review

Test Setup

4GB G.Skill Trident DDR3-2500
Gigabyte P55A-UD4
Intel Core i7-870
ASUS HD5850 Top
Thermalright MUX-120
Cougar 1000CM 1000W PSU
Windows 7 x64

For our testing we’ll be comparing against the Kingston HyperX T1 2133MHz which is the current best Dual-Channel kit we’ve had in our UD4.

Overclocking… or not

As you would expect the G.Skill XMP profile has to make some serious changes to enable it to run at the rated speed. It ups the BCLK to a heady 208MHz, only 3MHz shy of the limit on this particular board. Also worth noting is that according to G.Skill it should run at 9-11-9-28-2T, but our XMP is programmed to 9-11-11-31-1T.

      

The need to have such a high bus speed to obtain the 2496MHz RAM speed does leave us with a bit of a problem. Our Gigabyte P55 UD4 tops out at 211-212MHz on the BCLK, so overclocking isn’t really an option. Sure we could do it but an extra 36MHz wont show anything worthwhile. We can’t play with the dividers either as we’re already maxed out at 12 on the DRAM side of things.

Given this it was decided to go a little in the other direction, back to 200MHz BCLK which still gives us a Memory speed of 2400MHz but enables us to run at CAS8 instead. Specifically 8-10-10-28-1T still at 1.65v.

We could probably go slower still to get the timings a little tighter, but that’s utterly defeating the point of the kit.

   

Time to see how it performs.