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Review: Corsair DOMINATOR DDR3-1,866: 30GB/s bandwidth for Core i7

by Tarinder Sandhu on 4 February 2009, 14:12 3.35

Tags: Corsair

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qaqvk

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System setup and notes

Specifications
Memory Corsair TR3X6G1866C9DF Corsair TR3X6G1600C8D Crucial CT3KIT12864BA1339 Crucial CT3KIT25664BA1067
Memory capacity 6GB (3x 2GB) 6GB (3x 2GB) 3GB (3x 1GB) 6GB (3x 2GB)
Memory speed and timings 1,866MHz, 9-9-9-24 2T 1,600MHz, 8-8-8-24 2T 1,33MHz, 9-9-9-24 2T 1,066MHz, 7-7-7-20 2T
Rated voltage 1.65V 1.65V 1.5V 1.5V
CPU Intel Core i7 965 EE ES (3.20GHz) 
Uncore speed 3.73GHz 3.2GHz 2.66GHz 2.66GHz
Motherboard Foxconn Bloodrage X58
BIOS revision G17 (22/01/2009)
Graphics Card Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 512MB
Disk drive(s) Seagate 500GB SATA2 7200.11
Mainboard software Intel Inf 9.1.01007
Graphics driver Catalyst 9.1
PSU Corsair HX1000W
Operating System Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 64-bit
Approx. price at time of writing £344 £190 £82 £145

Tests

2D benchmarks SiSoft Sandra 2009 SP2 (15.72) Win64 memory bandwidth (float)
ScienceMark 2.0 memory latency
HEXUS.PiFast
wPrime (1024M calculation)
DivX 6.8.3 encode of 1.2GB file
Far Cry 2 benchmarking loading time

 

3D Benchmarks Far Cry 2 v1.01, 1,680x1,050 4x AA,  vhq, ranch long demo.
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, OpenGL, 1,024x768 0xAA, 0xAF low
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, OpenGL, 1,680x1,050 4xAA, 16xAF vhq

Setup notes

Using a stock-clocked Intel Core i7 965 Extreme Edition CPU, we're comparing the Corsair 1,866MHz memory to a 6GB pack of recently-reviewed Corsair DDR3-1,600 C8, Crucial DDR3-1,066, priced at around £145, and, to see if capacity makes much of a difference, a 3GB pack of Crucial's DDR3-1,333 RAM. Bear in mind that the uncore speeds are different for each setup.

One difference with respect to the gaming benchmarks is that we've increased the resolution to 1,680x1,050 in Far Cry 2 and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, to see if the system runs back to main memory more often.