Computex 2007 – Corsair Has Working 2000MHz DDR3

DRAM hits 2GHz, but with CL10 Timings!

Last month when I covered DDR3 versus DDR2 memory performance I was left asking who would be the first memory company to show off production modules running 2000MHz. Yesterday, Corsair Memory showed off the worlds fastest production DDR3 memory rated at a blazing-fast 1,600MHz (PC3-12,800) and had a preview of the Corsair DOMINATOR memory kit running at 2,000MHz (PC3-16,000). I just happened to be in the same building as Corsair when they sent out their press release, so I headed up to their suite to check out the test systems for myself.

When I arrived at their suite I found an Intel based test system that was running an Intel Core 2 Duo 6850 Processor on the P35 Express chipset. The motherboard used in their demo system was the ASUS P5K3 Deluxe DDR3 motherboard that was powered by the Corasir HK620W power supply and cooled by the Corsair Nautilus 500 water cooler. The video card used was the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT that was used to show off Corsair’s new 8-pin PCIe modular power cable for their PSU series. With Corsair products being used to the fullest they overclocked system to have the memory running at 2000MHz.

With one module running 2GHz at 10-10-10-24 timings the Corsair demo system was fully stable. Corsair even let us benchmark the system with what we wanted, so we fired up Sandra for a quick test drive of what this 2Ghz module could do.

With SiSoftware Sandra fired up we observed the memory bandwidth to be 8.5Gb/sec, which is impressive for a single module at CL10 timings. I told Corsair that I’d be more impressed when I can see two modules running in dual channel mode for better performance and they said we could give it a shot and grabbed another module.

With two modules running at 2GHz with CL 10 timings the test system was not stable enough to benchmark, but we were able to fire up CPU-Z 1.40 and grab some quick pictures.

I was happy to see that Corsair was also using the black memory sockets that are the farthest ones away from the CPU socket for overclocking. When I overclocked the Corsair 1333MHz ES memory kit last month I found that the orange memory sockets couldn’t overclock much past 1.7GHz and they have also noticed this on the ASUS P5K3 motherboard.

In closing don’t expect DDR3 2GHz memory to be out anytime soon as the failure rate for these IC’s is too high to bring a part to market. Corsair informed Legit Reviews that they will be releasing a high performance XMS3 DDR3 memory part at 1866MHz in the near future with the 2000MHz kits coming after that one. It seems Corsair is waiting to see if better IC’s come out from Qimonda, Samsung, Micron and Elpida before mass producing a kit at 2000MHz. Either way you look at it 2GHz kits are on the way and Corsair is the first company to show us a working dual-channel 2GHz DDR3 memory kit with some stability.