Topower Black-X Series DDR3 1333MHz 8GB Memory Kit Review

Once we’d been in the BIOS and tweaked the settings manually, we were able to get the memory to run at 1333MHz with stock timings. Due to the FSB fluctuating, we saw the speed increase slightly by a few MHz. We then continued to boot into Windows to double check the settings within CPU-Z.

After we had double checked the speeds and timings within CPU-Z, we opened up AIDA64 to see the stock performance of this kit. By looking at the stock performance, it allows you to have a level to work from and compare to when looking at overclocking.

When we look at the performance at stock, we can see that for a 1333MHz kit, we see the read, write and copy speeds slightly faster than other kits we’ve looked at, but only by around 100MB/s or so, but this is still an achievement over their rivals. The latency was also a bit lower than rival kits at 47.2ns compared with most 1333MHz kits being around the 54ns market. From our own personal experience with Topower memory modules, we do hold quite high hope for this set of modules when it comes to overclocking, so lets see how far it can be pushed.

As before, we want to eliminate any bottleneck from the processor, and so we overclocked our i7 3770k to 4.5GHz, allowing the memory controller to have a bit more space to deal with, which should hopefully allow us to increase the speed of our kit further than if the processor was at stock. We started to overclock by increasing the memory divider from 1333MHz to 1600MHz which it seemed to do with easy. Our next step was to obviously try the next divider which was the 1866MHz plateau, which with a little voltage increase and slacker timings, was able to do quite easily. It did seem that anything above this was going to take an even bigger jump in voltage or much looser timings, which once tried, was found to see a degradation in performance, so we found 1866MHz was the sweet spot for this memory. We got to this point by simply raising the multiplier, loosening off the timings and increase the voltage ever so slightly, to 1.55V.

To see how much of a performance increase we had gained, we continued to fire AIDA64 back up to run the same tests that were done at stock, and to of course test for the best stability. We found that the read speed has increased to 20604MB/s, the write speed to 22838MB/s and the copy speed to 23886MB/s with a latency dropping to a very low 39.8ns. These are fantastic results for a 1333MHz based kit and a great set of numbers when we look back to similar 8GB 1333MHz kits as these numbers are anywhere from 400MB/s to 4000MB/s faster in comparison.