Manufacturer: G.Skill
UK Price (as reviewed): £70 (inc. VAT)
We couldn’t get G.Skill to send us their 1600 C8 2×2gb Ripjaws kit, but seeing as I needed some memory for my new P55 rig, I purchased some. Their new line up of RAM is very eye-catching to say the least, from the “Perfect Storm” and “Trident” models, right through to the Ripjaws:
G.Skill’s specs:
| System Type | DDR3 |
| M/B Chipset | Intel P55 |
| CAS_Latency | 8-8-8-24-2N |
| Capacity | 4GB (2GBx2) |
| Speed | DDR3-1600 (PC3 12800) |
| Test_Voltage | 1.65 Volts |
| Registered/Unbuffered | Unbuffered |
| Error_Checking | Non-ECC |
| Type | 240-pin DIMM |
| Warranty | Lifetime |
Good to see the lifetime warranty, this is something we’ve seen as “the norm” from G.Skill. Slightly worrying was the “2N” part of the CAS Latency, but I was hoping that it would run at 1N with a bit of tweaking.
A closer inspection of the RAM reveals a solid heatspreader, which in turn allows access to the ICs on the module (no D9’s here !):
Test Setup:
MSI P55-GD65
Intel Core i5 750
Once I assembled the module again, they were installed into the above setup and I booted straight at 200×20. Interestingly, the BIOS on the GD65 did not want to automatically set the modules to 8-8-8-24, instead, detecting them as 9-9-9-24. A quick tweak later and I had them running at 8-8-8-24-1N.
Not a bad start, apart from Everest not quite reading the new P55 chipset even though I grabbed the latest version from their site.
Next, I tried a few combinations of lower timings and higher voltages, but I could not get any sort of stable results (this could be down to the motherboard), and decided to concentrate on seeing how far they would overclock, and boy was I suprised.
A quick increase of 90Mhz to 1692 at 8-8-8-24-1N didnt seem to phase the Ripjaws, so I kept going.
Unfortunately the i5 750 CPU is multiplier locked, so I couldn’t quite get 4Ghz on the CPU, but the Ripjaws were once again happy with an overclock of 100Mhz, again at 8-8-8-24-1N and standardvolts of 1.65v (1.66v set in BIOS).
The system still wasn’t showing any signs of instability, so I decided to carry on
And this is where I ended up. DIMM voltage was raised to 1.73v and timings put back to 9-9-9-24-1N, but the ripjaws were happy to run at 2114Mhz. Thats an overclock of over 200Mhz. Pretty impressive.
Personally I prefer to run RAM with tighter timings than outright speed, but it’s clear that these Ripjaws from G.Skill will give you the overclocking flexibility for any combination of multipliers, base clocks and dividers.
