Corsair XMS2 DOMINATOR PC2-8888 Memory Review

Overclocking

Overclocking the Corsair PC2-8888 Modules was a challange as we were limited by our processor. We have done a couple overclocking articles on our AMD A64 X2 4200+ AM2 processor before (part 1 & part 2) and know from prior overclocking expierences that the processors tops out around 3070MHz.

We were able to overclock the processor to it’s limits and reached 305MHz on the HTT before our system became unstable. We were able to get the system running at 307MHz putting the memory at 1227.6MHz (CPU-Z Validation Link), but it would fail Prime 95 testing when we tried running it for hours on end. At just 2.42 Volts on the memory we were able to overclock them from 1111MHz to 1219.4MHz with stability before we threw in the towel because our processors (we tried several AM2 processors) wouldn’t keep going.

Overclocked Performance:

To see how the memory does when overclocked we ran Serious Sam 2 again, but this time included the AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ AM2 processor and the AMD Athlon 64 X2 FX-62 AM2 processors at their default speeds. It should be interesting to see how our 4200+ overclocked with PC2-8888C4 memory does against the default FX-62 running PC2-6400C4 memory does. All timings were left at 4-4-4-12 2T for all the testing when overclocked.

The stock AMD 4200+ AM2 processor averages 104.9 frames per second in stock form. When overclocked and running PC2-8888C4 memory at it’s rated speed it jumps up to 136.6 frames, which is just shy of the stock FX-62 that runs 137.0 frames per second right out of the box. The good news here is that the FX-62 costs $869.99 compared to the $186.00 4200+ AM2 processor that now runs less than 1FPS behind it. When pushing our system almost to the max (302MHz HTT x 10 multiplier) we achieved a 3.03GHz frequency on the core and 1210MHz on the memory, which was good enough to pass up the FX-62 and score 150.2 frames per second. The little 4200+ went from 104.9 frames per second out of the box to 150.2 after some overclocking.

To sum up overclocking we saw performance numbers jump 45 frames per second from when we started by overclocking both the memory and the processor and have shown that AM2 processors can handle all the memory bandwidth you can throw at them.