Testing Method & Test Setup

To test the overclocking capabilities of the memory we are going to use Intel’s recently released Haswell platform. As memory overclocks are known to vary between different motherboards, we are going to perform the tests using two different platforms to be sure that our numbers are reliable.

Motherboard	ASUS Maximus VI Gene (BIOS 0607) Gigabyte Z87X-OC (BIOS F5q)
CPU	Intel Core i7-4770K ES @ 4.0 GHz
Graphic card	ASUS GTX 580
Memory	Kingston HyperX Beast KHX24C11T3K4/32X
SSD	Samsung PM840 Pro
PSU	Seasonic Platinum 660 Watts
OS	Windows 7, 64 bit SP1

Even though Haswell is very flexible on the memory frequency it is possible can set, very few people actually do base clock (BCLK) overclocking with their daily setups. Therefore, instead of our previous procedure of fixing the voltage and raising the frequency in 10MHz steps we are now going to fix the frequency and minimize the voltage in 0.01V steps.
As usual, our stability method of choice is HCI Memtest. Since we are dealing with a 32 GB kit, we use eight 2000 MB instances and call things stable if we see all of them to go past 150% without showing a single error.
Not to get things too complicated, we only set the primary timings, command rate (1T) and the memory voltage by hand while the rest of the settings are left for the motherboard and SPD to agree on.

Results

As usual, our goal is to see how memory reacts to voltage changes and in case with Hynix MFR this reaction translates in ability to run higher frequencies without having to raise the CAS latency. As to three other primary timings, the main factor for lowest stable values of those is frequency with voltage playing very little effect.
Speaking of end numbers, we couldn’t get over the rated 1200MHz regardless of timings and voltages tried with our Haswell setups, even after dropping two or three modules to get around IMC limitations. Yet, it was possible to run the Beast at DDR3-2400 at 10-12-11-30 and DDR3-2200 at 9-11-10-30 neither of which is a bad result for a 32 GB kit, which is usually not meant to be overclocked anyway.

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Page 1 - Introduction

Page 2 - Closer Look

Page 3 - Photo Gallery

Page 4 - Results

Page 5 - Conclusion