With DRAM prices approaching historic lows and an ever-growing installed base of 64-bit operating systems, 4GB memory kits are becoming more prevalent. Corsair, for example, now offers an assortment of DDR2 and DDR3 memory kits with 4GB capacities, whereas just last year 2GB was the norm.
The Dominator XMS3 TW3X4G1600C9DHXNV G is one of Corsair’s premium 4GB (2x 2,048MB), dual-channel DDR3 kits, targeted at users of Nvidia’s nForce 790i SLI platform, as the “NV G” in its product name suggests. The NV G also indicates that this memory kit is EPP 2.0-compatible, which makes configuring the kit to operate at its rated frequency of 1,600MHz quick and easy, and users won’t have to risk overclocking their processors to hit those speeds. And the Dominator branding means the kit is outfitted with Corsair’s excellent DHX cooling technology that cools not only the underlying DRAMs but also the PCB.
The 1.6GHz kit requires 1.8V to operate and offers 9-9-9-24 latencies. Latencies that high may be disappointing compared to some lower-capacity DDR3, but they are not out of the ordinary for high-capacity DDR3 kits such as this one.
We tested this particular Dominator memory kit in an nForce 790i SLI Ultra-based Asus Striker II Extreme motherboard, equipped with a Core 2 Extreme QX9650 processor, GeForce 8800 GTX, and Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit. With the RAM running at its rated frequency of 1.6GHz, it offered up 8.4GBps of memory bandwidth in SiSoft Sandra XII SP2 and 132.6fps in a low-resolution/low-quality Crysis benchmark. With a bump in voltage to 1.9V, I was able to overclock the kit to 1,820MHz, which resulted in 9.5GBps of available bandwidth and 134.8fps in Crysis.
These sticks make yet another quality memory kit from Corsair.
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