TEST BED

TESTING METHODOLOGY

   Whenever i test something which can be measured in terms of performance i always like comparing it with similar products just to see how well it stands its ground against them (comparing apples to apples is natural) and since this is not the first quad channel kit on our test bench we can now compare it against the previous ones. To give you the best and most accurate results possible we decided on using several methods including both benchmarking programs/suites and games. The benchmarking programs used are the well-known AID64 Extreme Engineer (formerly known as Everest Ultimate), the Sisoftware Sandra Pro, the old but quite reliable ScienceMark 64Bit and the all-time classic SuperPi 1.5MOD. Finally we use HAWX II as our reference benchmark game since due to its high FPS we are able to better showcase and pinpoint any differences between kits.

     By default the Crucial Ballistix Elite 16GB kit comes with a command rate of 2 but manually switching it to 1 didn't produce any issues whatsoever with any of our benchmarks and so since the differences between 1 and 2 are quite small (as you can see from the Kingston results) we decided to only test it with 1T. Overclocking the kit was actually quite easy and so by leaving the voltage on auto (slightly increased to 1.58v) we were able to achieve 1866MHz but we had to loosen the timings to 9-8-9-24 (could be because we also used a command rate of 1T here as well). Further overclocking was possible by manually increasing the voltage to 1.65v which yielded impressive results and more specifically allowed us to reach 2133MHz at 10-9-10-27 (again command rate 1) with slight issues however in HAWX II which were enough for us to stay at 1866MHz at 9-8-9-24. Still since these are basically two 8GB kits combined and not the same exactly as the 16GB kit retailing in the market right now you may be able to reach 2133MHz and perhaps even slightly more without issue.