Installation & Testing:

I've built and used a few DDR3 based systems since they first arrived which included some older and more up to date motherboards. Most of the earlier DDR3 motherboards performed and overclocked quite well. The newest tend to be even better and more successful at maintaining stability at higher clock speeds. Early DDR3 boards did quite well overclocking and pushing 1066 up to 1600 MHz memory modules to the brink. Faster 1800 to 1900 MHz memory in turn were quite often too much for the memory controllers to handle.

Memory Installed

Since only a few Quad Cores, whether vanilla or extreme, can keep up with the Front Side Bus ranges the Intel chipsets require in order to reach the 2000 MHz memory option, a proven E6750 Core 2 Duo were used in testing just to validate it's indeed 2000 MHz capable on Intel motherboards. My apologies, but I don't have any "special" quad core samples on hand that can keep up.

Something I've become accustomed to with Patriot, just as anyone expects from the likes of Kingston, is that the memory just seems compatible with any chipset. Each system immediately booted up with the memory frequency matching each processor's Front Side Bus. The only time manual settings were required in the BIOS was due to partial boot failure when exploring memory timings and frequencies.

There's a wide spectrum in terms of performance between various chipsets, thus the reason motherboards sporting the P35, X48, and Nvidia 790i Ultra were used to see just which platform does best with this kind of memory. Even though it's tuned for the 790 chipset, the kit could still prove to be the best option for Intel chipsets even if it doesn't reach 2000 MHz.

ASUS Blitz Extreme

Zotac 790i Ultra SLI

Rather than spam you with an endless gamut of games, software tests, and synthetic benchmarks, I thought it prudent to give you the down to earth results with a few games, a couple SANDRA tests, and frequencies.

First, have a look at stock memory bandwidth when matching memory to FSB settings with a couple different chipsets. Every 1600 MHz or faster DDR3 kits tested to date has been able to offer lower timings without issue at 1066 and 1333 MHz matching any Intel processor's FSB. The same thing is apparent in the 2000 MHz kit. As you can see, stock frequencies were pretty close at the memory's lowest timings matching the E6750's 1333 MHz FSB. Naturally, each chipset tends to utilize the memory a little differently. The 790i still manages to utilize the memory best edging past the two other chipsets just slightly.

After a few refreshes in SANDRA's memory benchmark, the Viper PC3-16000 finally topped out just over 12,100 MB/s which is of course an all new insane high score. The last score to come close was their PC3-15000 (1866 MHz) kit which finally had a worthy motherboard to compliment it's potential. Makes you wonder where these scores are going to go when Nehalem launches!

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