Corsair Dominator Platinum 16GB 3200MHz DDR4 Memory Kit Review

Corsair Dominator Platinum 3200MHz DDR4 Memory Overclocking:

No memory review would be complete without overclocking, so we had to see what the Corsair Dominator Platinum 16GB (4 x 4GB) 3200MHz DDR4 memory kit could pull off. Corsair has always been a favorite among enthusiasts that are looking for something that is fast, stable and still has some overhead left in it for tweaking. We tried overclocking this DDR4 memory kit from 3200MHz to 3300MHz, but our efforts were futile. Corsair currently offers a DDR4 3300MHz memory kit, so it looks like Corsair is tightly binning this super high-end memory kits and if it can run 3300MHz it is destined to become that kit of memory. Corsair is charging $889.99 for a Dominator Platinum Series 16GB 3300MHz memory kit (CMD16GX4M4B3300C16) versus $749.99 for the Dominator Platinum Series 16GB 3200MHz memory kit (CMD16GX4M4B3200C16) memory kit that we are looking at here today. It is extremely hard to find enough parts to build 3300MHz DDR4 memory kits and Corsair is currently sold out of 3300MHz kits and they are trying to produce more.

Since we were unable to take this kit up to 3300MHz we figured that we’d try to tighten the timings to see what would happen. Memory companies have been very conservative with timings on DDR4 memory kits, so surely we could do better than 16-18-18-36 with a 2T command rate.

We were delighted to find that the Corsair Dominator Platinum Series 16GB (4 x 4GB) 3200MHz DDR4 memory kit could run 15-15-15-30 timings with a 1T command rate on the ASUS X99 Deluxe motherboard that we were using for testing. Benchmarks like AIDA64 found that we had nearly 72,000 MB/s of copy bandwidth and the memory latency was an astonishing 55.3ns. Unfortunately, these settings weren’t rock solid for 24/7 use and were only usable for short benchmarking runs or somewhat intensive CPU benchmarks. We also couldn’t get into Windows 8.1 with C14 timings whatsoever be it 14-15-15-30 1T or 15-14-14-30 1T. What was fully stable?

The tightest we could get the Corsair Dominator Platinum Series 3200MHz DDR4 memory kit was 15-16-16-30 with a 1T command rate. We were able to run stability tests overnight, pass Ultra-X RAM Stress Test Professional (R.S.T. Pro) test runs and game for hours with those settings. Let’s see how this kit performs with the stock timings of 16-18-18-36 2T and then with 15-16-16-30 1T timings.