Conclusion Corsair certainly knows what they are doing in the performance memory market and the Dominator line of memory is amongst the most successful of any brand there is. The triple channel market has been absolutely flooded with memory kits lately and prices are starting to drop to a more than reasonable level. One could go as far as saying that prices are actually good. The question is, what separates the Corsair Dominator line of memory - particularly the 3x2GB TR3X6G1600C8D kit that we looked at today - from the rest of the pack? Aside from specifications, which are usually very similar if not identical amongst kits of a similar frequency/timing set, there isn't a whole lot different.  Until of course we take into account the physical characteristics of the Corsair Dominator line as their module cooling is one of a kind. Other manufacturers do offer cooling solutions but nothing as advanced as the DHX heat sink the Dominators use which cools both the ICs from the outside as well as through the PCB itself. Memory cooling may not enhance performance but it certainly will provide a more stable platform in warmer cases if temperature does become an issue. Another aspect of Dominator memory is that you are not just buying memory, you are buying support. Corsair offers top notch service and support as well as a quality warranty process that is very painless to take advantage of should that situation arise.
As far as performance goes, it is still early on in the i7 lifecycle and with that, the DDR3 triple channel memory kits. The specified timings of 8-8-8 at DDR3-1600 slots this kit ahead of the 9-9-9 kits at this frequency but slightly behind the 7-7-7 DDR3-1600 kits available. We were hoping to confirm the results of the Corsair in-lab testing of 3x2GB kits versus 3x1GB with our single card setup but it appears that the graphics card is the limit there and more than a single GTX 280 is required to not bottleneck the system. The memory bandwidth and system performance though of these new i7 setups with high quality DDR3 triple channel memory like the Corsair Dominator sure is impressive.
If we had to recommend this memory to a target audience we obviously couldn't point the high-end benchmarkers and overclockers its way. The overclocking headroom do to a lack of usable voltage just doesn't allow the clocking to scale and limits are found rather early. With that said, however, the headroom this kit did provide with the rated voltage is rather substantial and quite impressive reaching an almost DDR3-1800 at the 8-8-8 1T timings. This kind of headroom definitely gives the enthusiast the flexibility to seek out peak performance from a system with the limited memory ratios of the X58 chipset and i7 processors. For this reason, we can easily recommend anyone looking for performance memory that should give them some significant wiggle room from stock clocks to look at the Corsair Dominator 3x2GB TR3X6G1600C8D memory. At the price we can find it for in Canada it is reasonably competitive with the competition and not too far off the budget PC3-12800 9-9-9 kits but offer plenty more in overclocking and performance. Pros:- Corsair is a brand trusted by the enthusiast and hobbyists alike
- Top quality service from any number of avenues of access
- Respectable headroom for overclocking frequency as well as timings
- 3x2GB performance memory is becoming reasonably priced and this kit is no exception
Cons:- Does not scale well with voltage and not ready for high-end benchmarking
- The inevitability of installation issues in certain setups that comes with all tall memory modules
- No included fan, we would like to see all Dominator memory kits come with the Corsair memory fan
We would like to thank Corsair and their wonderful support staff for making this review possible. | 
