ocaholic - Memory > DDR3 > ADATA XPG V2 2x4GB DDR3-2800 CL12 1.65V Review

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Closer Look

The XPG V2 series makes way to a potential customer in a plastic blister which, once opened, is free to go directly into the trash bin as we could not figure out a way to successfully reuse it.

Trying to take the advantage of many manufacturers investing in gold colour schemes, Adata decided to pull one of their own on the XPG V2. Unfortunately, the shade of yellow that they use lies somewhere in between vanilla of ASUS and orange of the Gigabyte OC hence it doesn’t make a perfect match with either of the two.

As common these days, cooling function is delegated to aluminium sheets, which on XPG V2 rise above the black PCB by roughly a centimeter. Where things seem to differ from the rest of the field is the way heat is transferred from the chips to the heatsinks. Instead of going for the standard strip of thermal tape, Adata use a thermal pad sandwiched between two layers of thermal adhesive.

With sticky stuff out of the way, we see that the 2800C12 model is based on Hynix chips of 4Gbit density commonly referred to as MFR.

The SPD module on the XPG V2 provides information on the maker, model and production date of the memory, It also features five JEDEC profiles and an XMP that are designed to ease the process of getting the memory to run at advertised speeds.

Page 2 - Closer Look

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Photo Gallery

Page 3 - Photo Gallery

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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	ADATA AX3U2800W4G12-DGV
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 one can set, very few people actually do base clock (BCLK) overclocking on 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 an 8 GB kit, we use eight 750 MB instances and call things stable if we see all of them to go past 100% 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 is left for the motherboard and SPD to agree on.

Results

Traditionally, our aim is to see how memory reacts to voltage changes and in case with Hynix MFR this reaction translates in almost linear ability to run higher frequencies without having to raise the CAS latency. What comes to second and third entries in the primary timings list, tRCD and tRP, the main factor for lowest stable values of those is frequency, with voltage playing a role only in borderline areas. Lastly, the tRAS value we use in each part of the testing is a sensible value induced by an educated guess.
As could be expected from a top Hynix product, 2800C12 version of XPG V2 shows impressive results throughout the entire testing range. For a start, our CL9 and CL10 adventures has brought us to, respectively, DDR3-2400 and DDR3-2666 being held by inability to scale past 1.8V both times around. When it came to CL11, we could get the memory to run 11-13-12-32 at its rated speed with only 0.02V voltage increase and using CL12 we saw more than 66MHz headroom above specification.
While DDR3-2933 is where the capabilities of our CPU end with respect to full stability, but it’s not the end of the whole story. Eager to see what the memory is capable of when we relax stability levels and crank up the voltage, we ended up with SuperPi 32M passes at 1400MHz 10-13-12 and 1650MHz 11-15-15.

Page 4 - Results

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Conclusion

Looking up the price for AX3U2800W4G12 kits via geizhals.de, we see offers currently starting at 320 Euros plus shipping across the EU. Such price tag automatically puts the 2800C12 version of XPG V2 in the highest of leagues where, unfortunately, it does not stand a chance against any of the opposition by not being able to justify the amount of extra investment.
As expected, it cannot be said that the pinnacle of Adata’s XPG V2 lineup is lacking in ambitious decisions. We do like the looks and the overclocking potential of our kit, but single-sided construction eliminates the purpose of these modules as a performance weapon. For what is effectively an enthusiasts’ toy, the price tag seems to make very little sense, especially with Adata not being a common name amongst the enthusiasts.

Award

The 8GB version of Adata XPG V2 rated 2800C12 gets a rating of 3.5 stars out of five.