Corsair Dominator 3x2GB PC3-12800 C8 Memory Review | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| by 3oh6 | February 3, 2009 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Memory Installation & Test Setup Memory Installation & Test SetupThe first question on everyone’s mind when we pull out a new kit of memory with oversized heat sinks is: will those even fit in my setup? With standard height and width memory modules, installation photos or its own section are a bit overkill. With the Corsair Dominator line of memory and their Dual-path Heat Xchange or DHX technology, installation may be hampered in certain situations with larger CPU coolers. This will rely on the combination of motherboard, CPU cooler, and of course the memory. Let's take a look at how these modules fit in the EVGA X58 SLI motherboard with one of the bigger CPU coolers, the Thermalright Ultra-120 eXtreme.   All quiet on the western front, or we should say on the east/west front, even with the large fan footprint pushing and the Dominator modules in the closest memory slot. In this orientation, it is tight with the fan holder, but certainly works and should work well with the fan pulling air through the fins of the DHX heat sinks. On the EVGA motherboard, the green slots are the primary slots so the black slots will only be used when running six memory DIMMs but even with a potential 12GB of memory installed, the Dominators show no sign of an uncomfortable fit...so far.   The cease fire disappears when we turn the heat sink around in a north/south configuration as the DHX heat sinks are just too Yao Ming like for this setup. This is only true for the black slots, however, as the green slots are provided more than enough room in our setup for the Dominator modules. So unless you are running six modules, the EVGA X58 SLI and a Thermalright Ultra-120 eXtreme provide multiple heat sink orientations for use with Corsair Dominator DHX equipped modules. Now that we have the memory installed, let's take a look at how the memory is recognized in this same configuration.
The above CPU-Z and Memset screen shots show that at the BIOS defaults, the memory does not run at the specified ratings. This is due to the simple fact that the EVGA X58 SLI motherboard does not recognize the XMP profiles that Corsair has programmed and shown in the second CPU-Z image above. The good news is that this motherboard makes it really easy to get these particular modules up to speed, sort of speak. For a complete step-by-step process for adjusting the EVGA X58 SLI motherboard to run these modules at spec without any overclocking of the system, please visit the http://forum discussion thread for t... TR3X6G1600C8D. Here is how the entire setup will look for the subsequent overclocking and benchmarking... Test Setup
What we have here is a fairly typical Core i7 setup but a little under powered in the graphics processing department. This was done on purpose in order to provide a platform for the 3D testing that will compare single GPU results to that of a dual GTX 280 test setup that Corsair used in testing gaming performance between 3GB and 6GB of memory. This is also the reason we have a 3x1GB 'kit' of memory listed in the chart above. We will be comparing not only the gaming performance between 3GB and 6GB of memory, but the rest of our benchmarks as well. In the Windows Vista environment, it will be quite interesting to see if the 3GB setup can keep pace with our Dominator 6GB configuration. Our Windows Vista SP1 installation has been tuned for performance by reducing unnecessary services and bloat in order to minimize the memory footprint that plagues Vista out of the box.         | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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