CORSAIR VENGEANCE PRO 2666 C11 16GB Kit
OC HERO AWARD
RRP: TBA | Website: www.corsair.com
Test Machine • Intel Core i7 4770K • ASUS Maximus VI Extreme (0035) • CORSAIR FORCE LS 240GB • CoolerMaster Silent Pro M2 1500W • Windows 7 64-bit SP1
W
hen we initially received this kit, we had it in our collective minds that this must be another Hynix MFR based set as this is seemingly all you can get of late. These chips are sensible for vendors, but ultimately a sad situation for us the end users. Fortunately though, the use of such chips still isn’t as pervasive as one may think. This is especially true of the lower end or rather the nonstratospherically priced kits. Here in the middle is where you’ll find the most interesting memory and this set here is no different. In fact this just may be one of the better sets we’ve 26 The OverClocker Issue 26 | 2013
tested in a long time. Before we get into performance or rather overclocking, it’s important for us to mention that from where we stand. There simply isn’t anything to be gained by yet more frequency records. We understand where the motivation is for these kits and overclocking endeavours, but ultimately if it’s not useable in the any of the benchmarks then the entire exercise becomes pointless. Frequency validation isn’t something that can be appreciated by everyone, even though we all know what it means. Performance and efficiency however is a different story. It is in this aspect where the CORSAIR Vengeance Pro kit so happens to be very strong. Of course this is assuming you’re on the Z87 chipset. You may be able to do the same with Z77, but you are relying on luck there, significantly more so than you are on Z87. Fortunately we were able to test this kit on three motherboards (two of which
are reviewed in this issue) and we found that the performance and overclocking headroom amongst them is pretty consistent. This spoke well for the RAM and solidified our experience and opinion on it. This is important because the variations in motherboards may give mixed results, particularly when it comes to such high frequencies. To that end, we started our performance analysis from a modest 2400MHz in an attempt to see just how tight we could pull in the primary timings. Unfortunately 9-1110-28 was the best we could do. Good performance at those timings but as you can see, it’s nothing compared to what the Dominator 2,666 C10 kit could achieve at the same speed, which was 8-10-10-21. So immediately we gave up on that endeavour. The performance, while appreciated, was actually worse than operating the RAM at its specified frequencies. It is thus we quickly moved on to 2,600MHz and further,