James Trevaskis wins HWBOT 16GB memory clocking challenge with 2720 MHz

Overclocking competition overlords HWBOT recently held a memory overclocking competition in conjunction with manufacture Geil. The competition consisted of 3 rounds including Super PI, lowest memory clock and highest memory clock with 4x 4GB modules.

I decided to enter the 16GB of ram challenge, I have played around with clocking 16GB of memory in the past but not seriously pushing the frequency. I chose the GSKILL Trident 2000 MHz 8-9-8-24 kit as I have tested this kit vigorously in 2x4GB 8GB configurations and easily achieved 2500 MHz.

Starting with the P55 platform and an Intel Lynnfield 870 CPU, I was only able to achieve 2480 MHz with the timings of 9-11-9-27. At this point I thought I was done as P55 is known as the best memory clocking platform.

I quickly moved to X58 and this is where the real magic happened. I relaxed the memory timings to 11-15-15-31, TRFC at 200 and loosened the B2B latency. I started up my single stage cooling, which is an evaporator based cooling solution (like a fridge for your CPU), which set my CPU at -50 degrees Celsius. Instantly I hit 2600 MHz, wow this is great. After playing with some more of the sub timings I was at 2720 MHz before I knew it.

What I had achieved in 6 hours with my P55 setup I was passing within an hour on my X58 system. I put this down to the power of the IMC on Gulftown. Sure P55 has traditionally been great at memory clocking, but this is because uncore isn't a limitation. I believe X58 is probably the stronger platform for clocking any high density memory modules as it is a easier to drive 3 modules in triple channel and the 4th in its own channel than 2 modules over 2 channels as per P55.


My Setup:
4x GSKILL Trident 2000 8-9-8-24 4GB
Gigabyte X58A-UD7 rev 2.0 with GOOC2010 bios
Intel 990X Gulftown CPU
Single Stage @ -50
Western Digital Velicoraptor 600GB SATA3
Windows 7 32bit SP1


Results:

CPU-Z Validation

I made a quick YouTube video of the setup.