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G.Skill TridentX PC3 21300 8GB 2666C11-13-13-35 Kit Review

Memory by leeghoofd @ 2012-07-16

The G.Skill brand has become one of the more popular brands in the enthusiast community. This Taiwanese RAM company has won the hearts of many overclockers, especially due their binning methods and affordable price tag. Therefore G.Skill manages time after time to launch RAM kits in multiple speed/timing versions, in different quantities and best of all they usually sport some extra overclocking headroom. With each new CPU platform that pops up, G.Skill introduces simultaneously a new series of RAM. When Intel launched Ivy Bridge, the TridentX RAM series popped up on the G.Skill website. The RAM vendors had to redo their binning methods, mainly due to the high ram speed support of the new Ivy Bridge CPU's. Enthusiast RAM isn't solely based anymore on just tight timings, high RAM speeds is one of the new requirements. The TridentX kit reviewed today is one of the higher specced kits, supporting a whopping 2666Mhz at CAS 11-13-13-35 2T timings out of the box.

Test Setup and Methodology

Our test platform was swapped from our trusty Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H to the ASUS ROG Gene V board. And all this due for one reason: the BIOS from the ASUS boards is lightyears ahead of the competition. Especially regarding user flexibility and furthermore in Ivy Bridge's case: RAM compatibility. A bad BIOS can literally break a well designed board. Usually there are workarounds for the lacking coding, but not many users are interested to debug a retail board's BIOS. I think we all agree on the fact that if you buy a product it has to work adequately out of the box. So the hardware setup of the day looks like this:

Intel I7-3770K@4500Mhz (1.25Vcore)
ASUS ROG GENE V board (0087 bios)
ASUS GTX 480 296.10 WHQL drivers
Western Digital 1TB Green CAVIAR series
Corsair AX1200 PSU

Now what have we tested: first it has to become clear if a high speed RAM kit is worth the extra cash over a more budget friendly mainstream kit. Hence why we opted to simulate a 1600C9-9-9-27 kit with our TridentX kit. Secondly G.Skill has some other TridentX versions besides this 2666C11 kit. The 2400C10 kit is pretty affordable, retailing around 100 euro's for 8Gb. Alike the 1600 speeds we try to replicate the performance of the TridentX 2400C10-12-12-31 kit. Last but not least a stable 24/7 overclock on the rams at 2800C11-14-14-35. Too bad we couldn't achieve the exact timings of the high end TridentX 2800c11-13-13 kit.

A quick sum up of the tested speeds:

1600Mhz C9-9-9-27 1T
2400Mhz C10-12-12-31 2T
2666Mhz C11-13-13-35 2T
2800Mhz C11-14-14-35 2T

Where is the 2600C10 kit ? We couldn't manage 2600C10-12-12 with our 2666C11 kit, no matter the voltages set or subtiming tweaks that we tried.

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