Team Group Xtreem Vulcan DDR3 Memory Kit Review

Checking the XMP profiling has carried through we always drop into CPU-z just to double check our timings and here we see the memory running at 9-9-9-24 with a command rate of 1T.

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.

Compared to some other kits that we’ve seen the bandwidth is not overly high at stock, but we do get a reasonable level of performance with speeds of 17789MB/s read, 17516MB/s write and 18631MB/s copy with a latency of 41.6ns.

Given this kit is listed as being the overclockers kit by Team Group, we do anticipate that there is going to be a good level of improvement in performance to be had when pushing things a little.

Overclocking our CPU to 4.4GHz to open up the memory controllers scope of speed, we first of all try the 1800MHz divider with timings still locked to stock values. The kit easily booted at this speed and we did try further on dividers along but was greeted with a series of unsuccessful boots. This then moves us to the BLCK, but we again found that even with a 0.1MHz increase, the kit became unstable and the board refused to boot.

With the kit now at 1800MHz, we find that there is a marked difference in bandwidth with results that we would class as a little more normal. We find the read speeds now up to 20627MB/s, write up to 21499MB/s and copy at 21602MB/s with a reduced latency of 36.9ns.

Following these results, we feel that there is a lot more to be had out of this kit, especially in terms of speed let alone bandwidth. Hoping back into BIOS, we set the timings all to auto to allow our motherboard to adjust them accordingly to keep the kit running, but at this point we came across a stumbling block. We found that no matter what we did, the board refused to boot with the memory set to anything more that 1800MHz, and the timings were not running free like they were supposed to. This resulted in us not being able to push the kit any further and even going a little more hands on and manually adjusting the timings made no difference with a string of non successful boots and a bemused reviewer. We did try the kit in another board to ensure that this was not down to a compatibility issue, however we found the results to be identical with no booting above 1800MHz.