Pushing For Speed

With testing out of the way, I set about to see what kind of headroom the Ballistix Elite 3600 MHz has. I left the voltages and timings at their XMP defaults and started increasing the frequency divider until the system failed to boot. At that point, I backed it down to the last bootable configuration and did some basic stability testing. I was only able to get a 200 MHz gain out of the Ballistix Elite 3600 MHz at stock voltages.

After testing to confirm that 3800 MHz was stable, I went back into the BIOS and started digging a little deeper to try to squeeze a little more out of the kit. I increased the DRAM voltage from 1.35 volts to 1.4 volts, VCCSA to 1.35 volts, and VCCIO to 1.35 volts, but couldn't get any more out of the kit. 200 MHz is pretty abysmal, especially for such an expensive kit. Memory is always a case of varying mileage, and it could just be that this kit does not get along with my board/CPU combo, but a kit with a price this high should still have more to give.