Patriot Limited Edition ‘Intel Extreme Masters’ DDR3 2133MHz 8GB Memory Kit Review

Naturally we want to ensure that the XMP profile in BIOS has stuck, so as always we hop into CPU-Z and check the memory tab. CPU-Z confirms the timings as 11-11-11-27 at a speed of 2133MHz. Unusually we notice that the kit used a command rate of 3T, something that we very rarely see.

After CPU-Z had confirmed our settings had been applied, we fired up AIDA64 to check the stock performance of the memory on our Z77 motherboard.

Stock performance of the kit os pretty good for a 2133MHz kit, with read, write and copy speeds of 20328MB/s, 18579MB/s and 22439MB/s respectively with a latency of 38.3ns.

Considering the Viper 3 was chosen for the Intel Extreme Masters overclocking tournaments, we are hoping that it has a good potential for overclocking over the 2133MHz mark, taking into account that this is already relatively high speed so we shouldn’t be expecting 100’s of MHz in gains.

In the BIOS we first tried the next memory divider of 2400MHz with a slight hope that it would make it at stock timings, but this was a bit too optimistic, so moving over to the BCLK, we started to increase the bus speed slowly. At a low bus speed of 101.1MHz we started to get a no-boot or BSOD scenario and dropping down to 101MHz gave us a stable boot, leaving us at an overclock point of only 2154MHz.

Going back into AIDA, the mere 21MHz overclock has had a massive effect on the bandwidth, with the read speeds increasing by 2703MB/s to 23031MB/s, write speeds by 4805MB/s to 23384MB/s and copy also by 3651MB/s to 26090MB/s. The kits latency, as we would expect, did drop down with the faster speed ,with a time of 35.5ns.

Considering that there was not a huge improvement in speed with the timings locked to stock speeds, we are hoping that letting the BIOS adjust them automatically will allow the speed to rise that much higher and past the 2200MHz barrier.

Back in BIOS we slowly began to notch up the BCLK once more, but at anything higher 101.3MHz we found that the system would fail to POST, even with the memory controller opened up by overclocking the CPU to 4.5GHz.

In the end we had to settle for a modest BCLK of 101.3MHz, giving us a memory speed of 2160MHz. We do have to note that the timings set by the BIOS were a little tighter than stock with only the cycle time raised by a fraction, leaving us with 10-11-10-30 and a lower command rate of 2T.

Considering the huge jump in bandwidth given by the slight overclock last time round we were hoping for a similar story again, and the kit was not going to leave us unhappy on that front. We again saw an increase in bandwidth all round, with read speeds rising a further 670MB/s to 23701MB/s, write by 76MB/s to 23460MB/s and copy by 895MB/s to 26985MB/s.

We also found the latency dropping further down to a time of 32.7ns.

Given the fact that this limited edition kit is hand picked for stability and quality, we was expecting a little more in terms of overclocking headroom, but short of increasing the voltage as we used to, we now leave this as stock levels so what we have achieved is actually not bad. Were we to increase the voltage I would expect that we would be able to get a whole lot more from the kit.