After working with these sticks for over sixty hours of testing one thing became rather clear: G. Skill has tightly binned their Samsung RAM IC’s. This is both a good thing and a bad and it really will come down to what you as an enthusiast are interested in: ease of use or getting enjoyment from finding the actual limits of your new tech purchase.
Basically, on the one hand there is very little ‘chip lottery’ evolved with overclocking them so the chances of getting a golden set of sticks that allows for massive overclocking potential is all but impossible. On the other these kits do come heavily factory overclocked and can be counted on to be 100% stable at their factory overclock. In other words, when opting for this kit you are paying a small premium for G. Skill to have done most of the hard work for you, but if you really think DDR4-3400 is not enough speed of you…. well you are better off looking at the higher binned versions.
We say this as G. Skill has (probably) already found all the golden Samsung ICs in a given batch… and used them in the official DDR4-4100 kits. To be honest we doubt many consumers will be unhappy with hitting DDR4-3400 speeds – as this is extremely fast. So fast that outside of some very niche areas we doubt many would tell the difference between this kit and the much more expensive DDR4-4000 option.
Now with all that said, there is going to be some room left for improvement and this will vary from sample to sample. In our particular case we found the highest rock solid, ultra-stable overclock to be DDR4-3600. More importantly we did not need to feed additional voltage to get it (1.35v was enough) and in fact pushing more voltage did absolutely no good… unless we were willing to hit 1.45v. If we were fine with this level of voltage, we could have pushed them to the DDR4-3700 range. However even then we would have had to loosen the timings up significantly to make them fully stable. With so little extra speed gained from pushing more voltage than we are comfortable with, and also using downright sloppy timings, we feel that DDR4-3600 is about the best you can expect from this kit.
Once again you will either really like the fact that this kit is darn near ‘plug and play’ with all the ‘hard work’ done for you, or you will dislike the fact that this amount of untapped performance is so minor. Then again this is a ‘free’ upgrade and really will not take all that much effort to do! With that being said before anyone changes their mind on the Trident Z DDR4-3600 kit and purchases this cheaper kit instead, a few things have to be pointed out. First and foremost, in order to hit DDR4-3600 we did have to loosen the timings a smidge. Specifically, instead of 16-18-18-38-2T, we had to drop back to CAS Latency of 17 and use 17-18-18-38-2T. This many not seem like that big a deal, and really is not, but 17-18-18-38-2T is slower than the official Trident Z DDR4-3600’s CL16 speed. Furthermore, the DDR4-3600 kit is not only CL16 but is actually faster at 3600 than this kit is at 3400, with timings of 17-18-18-36-2T. In other words, there is very little room to manually overclock, and to be honest we are fine with that. This kit is fast, stable and gorgeous enough that not having all that much gas left in the tank is not that big a deal. You may disagree with this, and as such may wish to think long and hard about the faster options available.
