| ||||
| by 3oh6 | July 16, 2008 | ||||
| Memory Installation & Test Setup Memory Installation & Test Setup: With standard size heat sinks on memory, we generally just take a couple quick photos of the modules in the testing motherboard. With the added width and height of the Mushkin Ascent heat sinks, however, we will take a few looks at the memory in a couple different setups to see what we might run into. In all honesty though, we don't expect any issues as current generation motherboards are so well laid out that large memory heat sinks are rarely an issue, even with large CPU coolers.   Starting off in the ASUS P5E3-Premium, we can see there are likely not going to be any issues with the larger heat sinks. As we have said, motherboards are better designed and large CPU coolers just don't interfere too much with memory slots anymore. We can, however, see that despite the memory fitting in slots side by side; they do have to bow out a little bit. This really isn't an issue and even in this configuration with another pair in the other two slots, there should be no problems with cooling thanks to the great design of the Ascent heat sinks.   Dropped into the 790i motherboard we will be using for testing, again, there are no clearance issues with the large Thermalright Ultra-120 in place on the CPU and when mounted in parallel slots, we have no problems arise. We will be running the memory in the black slots anyway as they are the preferred slots for memory clocking on reference 790i motherboards.
We will be testing this memory in the EVGA 790i motherboard today but we already know that with a lack of EPP profiles, the memory is simply going to boot up at the default timings and frequency that the motherboard sets. So, we figured we should see how the XMP profiles work in the ASUS P5E3-Premium since it is sitting right here. From left to right we have a pair of CPU-Z screens showing that the board detects the XMP profiles and sets everything up automatically at the BIOS defaults. We can't say enough how much we like the XMP profiles with an XMP compatible motherboard. Getting up and running at spec is as simple as clearing the CMOS. The last two screen shots above are of Memset showing the secondary timings and it is nice to see Mushkin has gone relatively aggressive here. The one exception is tRD (Performance Level) which is set to 7. We would have liked to see a 6 but, we can take care of that manually as the board can handle it no problem. Time to see how our test platform is going to shake down...  Test Platform:
As we can see, the testing of this memory will be done on an EVGA 790i Ultra-SLI motherboard that is the same as the NVIDIA reference design. This motherboard has been found to respond quite well to Mushkin Ascent 2x2GB kits as was found in the EVGA forums. We figured if end users were having success with the 790i then we might as well try for ourselves. It is a known fact that the 790i motherboards can sometimes play games with certain kits of memory so we had our fingers crossed as we set everything up.  | ||||
| |
| Latest Reviews in RAM | |||||||||
|
