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Published: February 20, 2009 | Source: Patriot | Author: Rich Weatherstone

Patriot 6GB DDR3 PC3-12800 1600MHz Viper Series Low Latency Kit

Test Setup

For today’s testing we will be using the Gigabyte EX-58 UD5, a mid-range Core i7 motherboard from Gigabyte that will allow us to push the memory on test to its absolute limit. Here’s a breakdown of the rest of the components:

 
Processor
Intel Core i7 920 ‘Nehalem’ @ 2.66Ghz

Motherboard
Gigabyte EX58-UD5

Memory
Patriot 6GB DDR3 PC3-12800 1600MHz Viper Series Low Latency Kit
Corsair CL8 1600MHz 8-8-8-24 3x2GB kit

Graphics Card
Nvidia 280GTX

Drivers
GeForce 180.60

PSU
Gigabyte Odin 1200w

Operating System
Windows Vista Ultimate 64bit SP1 + Updates

 
For testing the memory we used a number of synthetic benchmarks and games:
 
Synthetic Benchmarks
  • Lavalys Everest 4.10
  • SuperPI mod_1.5
  • Sisoft Sandra 2009
3D Benchmarks
  • 3DMark Vantage
  • Far Cry 2
 
For the run of benchmarks, we will be comparing the 1600MHz 6GB Patriot kit to the 1600MHz 6GB Corsair Dominator kit which on the surface has the exact same performance profile.

 

Overclocking
 
Starting from scratch we disabled on the settings that may affect the overclocked settings such as Intel Speed Step as well as disabling the C-State settings which may also affect some of the results in the benchmark testing phase of the review. Here’s how the sticks look at stock speed:
 
 JEDEC

stock cpu stock memory
 

We expected great things from these sticks and we were not disappointed. First off, we tried bumping the bandwidth to 1800MHz and to our surprise, it booted into Windows where we ran 3DMark and a few runs of Super PI. This was the maximum our previous best kit, the Corsair Dominator managed so we were intrigued to see if we could get more. Ambitiously we went straight for the jugular and tried out for 2000MHz, but alas, this was too much for the Patriot kit. So we found a nice middle ground of 1900MHz which was stable as a rock.
overclock cpu Overclock memory 
 

To get to this speed we had to slacken the timings to 9-9-9-24 but the benefits of 300MHz over stock will no doubt negate this difference. We tried lowering the timings at the stock speed of 1600MHz to 7-7-7-24 but the motherboard refused to POST, even with a slight bump in voltage to 1.7v. Despite this, we were impressed overall by the ease at which the Patriot kit overclocked. At 1900MHz this kit will no doubt gobble up anything we throw at it but we will return the kit to its stock settings to see how it compares with the Corsair Dominator kit.