Overclocking

For overclock testing I set out to overclock the Elite kit within our normal parameters. That is with the voltage locked at 1.45 volts and the timings set to the XMP setting which in this case is 16-18-18-38 and without any cooling changes. This keeps things consistent from kit to kit, this isn’t setting out to see what the max possible overclock this kit is capable. In fact just a few weeks ago this kit reached 5726 MT’s using LN2 and I know I won’t be anywhere near that. The timings for this kit are the most limiting factor, loosening them up a little would make a big difference in what we can get out of the kit. But I was curious how much room over the 3600MHz stock speed there was left. So after locking in the timings and voltage I started by booting the kit up at 3800MH, a small overclock and this went smoothly. I then rebooted and went for 4000MHz which wouldn’t boot so I had to go back to 3800 Mhz for our overclock testing.

With the moderate overclock in place I did go ahead and run through all of the same testing as before. I’m not going to go into detail on each result but it is interesting to see where the small overclock helped and where it didn’t. For example, write speeds went up but read speeds didn’t and latency actually got worse. Cinebench improved in the multi-core test but didn’t on single core and Passmark actually dropped in performance. Again our specific test parameters which limit the voltage and use the XMP timings really hurt the Ballistix Elite kit when overclocking. That said using the same requirements this kit did outperform the Ballistix Sport kit I reviewed last but that kit did offer more headroom from the stock clock. Considering they are using Micron E-die memory ICs you aren’t going to find a better kit for overclocking once you loosen up the timings a little bit, E-dies have been dominating the overclocking records left and right.