First let us make it crystal clear that we did not find the actual limit to these ram modules; rather they scale almost scarily good right along with voltage increases. Basically on both X99 and Z170 systems you will run out of nerve long before these sticks let you down. We honestly pushed them past 1. 5v and they were still rock solid…but to our way of thinking that is simply too high for long term stable overclocks. Instead we consider 1.40v to be the absolute highest we would recommend pushing any DDR4 modules.
This may only be an additional 0.2 volts of power but that still is over 16 percent increase in voltage. This is more than enough for DDR4. With these limitations in mind we focused in on exactly what this sticks could do timing wise, and then dialed in the speed. We feel that this combination is the optimal combination as while you can get more speed if you make the timings ultra-sloppy the wastage more than negates the extra speed. As such so we will show both the tightest timings we could get and the most optimal combination we could get. This way you can decide which is more important to you and your build.
With this in mind we started dialing in and what we found was extremely impressive to say the least. Basically by keeping the Command Rate (CR) hard set to 1 we were able to dial in a DDR4-3000 speed on our X99 rig. If we had wished to loosen this to 2 we could have accomplished this as well on the Z170 system with all sticks, but do to the fact that there is only two channels and yet four sticks of RAM this would have meant only using 16GB (aka two sticks). As such 2T is a given for Z170 systems; however, on Z170 and only two sticks 1T # DDR4-3000 is also easily doable.
For some strange reason we did hit a major bottleneck at 15-15-15-1T that would have required more than 1.5v to overcome, but overall getting an additional effective 334Mhz out of these sticks and at tighter timings is damn impressive. Color us impressed.
Equally impressive is if we were willing to trade speed for tighter timings we could easily take these ‘slow’ DDR4-2666 sticks and turn them into 12-12-12 sticks at DDR4-2666 speeds! Finding 12-12-12 rated sticks is difficult to say the least and if you do find them…expect to pay a lot more than what this kit goes for. Obviously Micron skims only the cream of each batch off for their retail arm (AKA Crucial) – and it shows!
