Corsair 1GB TWIN2X1024-8500

As mentioned in the previous section, these chips use Micron D9 chips. These chips have had a great reputation, especially lately, with their great overclocking abilities. Now, because 1066MHz is bleeding edge as it is, I didn’t expect it to get much better than that. Either way, my goal was to hit DDR2-1100, but that didn’t happen.

Stable Overclocks
• 333MHz, 3-3-3-8, 1.8v, 200FSB, 2.8GHz
• 400MHz, 4-4-3-8, 1.9v, 240FSB, 3.37GHz
• 445MHz, 4-4-3-8, 2.2v, 267FSB, 3.738GHz
• 467MHz, 4-4-3-8, 2.2v, 280FSB, 3.926GHz
• 500MHz, 4-4-4-8, 2.2v, 250FSB, 3.5GHz
• 534MHz, 5-5-5-15, 2.2v, 267FSB, 3.740GHz (Stock)
• 534MHz, 5-4-4-15, 2.2v, 267FSB, 3.740GHz
• 540MHz, 5-5-5-15, 2.2v, 270FSB, 3.786GHZ

Now one thing I have to mention is the fact that at first, I was unable to have stability at stock speeds. This is because there was a lot of stress on my motherboard compared to slower speeds. Increasing the available voltages in my BIOS such as MCH and ICH Chipset, proved to be the problem. After increases the voltages, the memory was as stable as any memory could be. If your chipset doesn’t have active cooling and you are a little wary of increasing the voltages, you may want to make sure you have good airflow or even a fan blowing at the chipset heatsink.

As you can see, I didn’t hit my DDR2-1100 stable goal but rather DDR2-1080… still a great overclock. As I mentioned, these chips love voltage and here’s proof. With 2.4v, I was able to pull of DDR2-1100 with extremely tight timings of 4-4-4-8. Now, these are not stable speeds and timings by any means, but they may very well be with more voltage. Sadly, my un-modded P5WD2-E only goes up to 2.4v.

You may also wonder why I underclocked the modules. Well, there are two reasons for this. First, because they didn’t actually have much overclocking power due to being such a high speed to begin with.. three settings is not much fun to benchmark with. Secondly, I was interested in seeing how they compared at slower speeds compared to other modules. The only setting I will actually be comparing to other modules is the fourth in the above list. That setting specifically has proven to be the best for my motherboard and CPU. It’s the highest I can take my FSB but retain great timings and speeds on most any modules.