G.SKILL PIS Series 2200MHz CL7 (2 x 2GB) Kit Review

[siopao1984]

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G.SKILL PIS Series 2200MHz CL7 (2 x 2GB) Kit Review by VR-Zone.com

G.Skill is a prominent maker of DDR3 SDRAM, known for their reasonable prices and high clocking kits, their PI series is no exception. Today we will take a look at one of their legendary kits, the F3-17600CL7D-4GBPIS which boasts some pretty nice specs. It is rated to run at DDR3 2200 with a low CAS Latency of only 7. Let's see how this famous P55 era kit runs on the Z68 platform.

So today we have our hands on a really well speced kit, the PIS 2200 4GB kit with timings of 7,10,10,28 CR2 at 1.65v. These timings and speed can be loaded through XMP profiles on most P55 and X58 boards, and also with profiles on AMD 990FX platform with a Bulldozer processor. Yet we run into an issue with the LGA1155 platform, in that we are limited to a 21.33 memory divider and only slight BLCK adjustment, so we brought in the Maximus 4 Gene-Z because of ASUS's good reputation with LGA1155 memory clocking. This kit isn't a new one to hit the market; in fact it was released back in the P55 days, and optimized for that platform. Many overclockers have taken it for a spin, and it seems to perform very well even at its rated speed, but what would this review be without some tweaking?



he re-emergence of this kit shouldn't come as a surprise, since most manufactures think that overclockers are fine with lower voltage and higher CAS latency, but that is just not the case. Overclockers wouldn't mind pushing some extra juice into their memory, as long as the ICs can take it and it helps clocking. When we look at G.Skills competition, we find many high priced kits with worse specs. In fact on Newegg we can't even find DDR3 2200mhz kits with anything lower than CAS 9, what makes it worse is that a year ago the line would be full with low latency high speed kits. Whether this is due to a lack of good memory ICs, or by the emergence of higher density kits, we do not know. What we do know is that this kit is most likely based upon PSC modules, and not BBSE, but G.Skills policy is to not reveal the ICs used. What we were told is that if G.Skill has ICs that fit the bill and can work at these specs , then they will be sold as such. The only way we know that these as PSC is by other user’s experiences with them, as well as the fact that they don’t scale much past 1.72v and that the tRCD is very hard to lower past 2100mhz, both characters of PSC based memory.



Here are the specs straight from G.Skill.:

[siopao1984]

When we review memory we look for a few things on the memory itself. The first few things have to do with appeal, such as the color of the PCB, and the overall look of the heatsinks. Next we look at the practicality of the heatsinks, the contact between the heatsinks and the modules, and the included accessories.

So when we first saw this kit we were very pleased by the overall look, except for that fact that it has a green PCB. The extra touch of the black PCB can really add to a memory modules curb appeal, but regardless the specs of this kit make it what it is. yet there are many out there who see their memory everyday, as computer hardware enthusiasts are buying cases with windows and open air benches, they like to have everything match.



The fan itself isn't bad looking; it almost looks like a pair of human arms grasping the slots. The fan lights up blue and it is made of plastic. In fact plastic may be better in some cases, because the metal housings of other fans from let’s say corsair, can short out a long GPU, as the fan stand will come close to the PCB of the GPU.



In a practical sense the fan is a bit big, and we will look at that later when we install all the parts.



Now we look at some of the more practical parts of the memory, such as the heatsinks. They are very tall, and not detachable like some of the Corsair dominator modules, yet they have slits, and it seems like there is enough metal to actually disperse heat. That is a good sign, and we approve of the heatisnks' s design. Air can almost get trapped inside, and that is a good thing.



Here is a shot of the thermal pad and the modules. Instead of gluing the modules to the heatsink, G.Skill has used a thermal pad. Corsair seems to glue their modules, and yet many uses need to take the heatsinks off for LN2 benching, or if they don't allow for much CPU heatsinks clearance. We do not recommend that you remove the heatsinks, but it seems that with a little heat they will come off without too much damage. Please understand if you do decide to remove them, you can rip off the ICs and void your warranty at the same time.

[siopao1984]

Here is the test setup we used to test the G.Skill modules:





Here you can see that the fan really is nice and blue, the only downside is that it covers up a large part of the CPU heatsink area. We don't really know how you can fit an aftermarket cooler for the CPU on there without moving the fan to the side. Yet we do get a fair amount of airflow from the fan.



Here we can see that the cooler fits on the board very nicely. It is designed to just be dropped in without the use of a screw driver, and we really like that fact.

[siopao1984]

We used AIDA64 Extreme Edition as our benchmark for memory, the benchmark was run 3 times, and the best score of those 3 times were used. When we overclock the memory we used Memtest 86+ for error checking and Intel Burn Test for in-windows. We were limited to memory divider though, even though the Maximus 4 Gene-Z has a 24x memory divider, we were unable to get this memory up to that speed, even with looser timings. instead we used our highest BLCK of 105mhz coupled with the 21.33 divider to come up with 2200mhz+ clocks.

2200 7-10-10-28 T2 @ 1.65v
2200 7-10-7-28 T1 @ 1.65v
2250 7-10-7-28 T1 @ 1.72v
1923 6-9-6-24 T1 @ 1.65v

First off at stock:



Next we see if we can lower the timings at DDR3 2200 with the same voltage:



We were able to do some good with stock voltage, we changed from 7-10-10-28 CR2 to 7-10-7-28 CR1, a huge change.

Now we see what we can do over 2200mhz with some nice low timings, voltage is still at 1.72v:

Below is our best OC with frequency and timings, to go higher than 2240, we needed to lossen CAS back to 7 to be stable.



Now we see what we can do at lower frequencies (1866) with tighter timings:



Here we are able to lower our timings significantly, down to 6-9-6-24 CR1, and our scores are okay, but not as good as at a higher frequency.

On the Sandy Bridge platform we are pretty much limited in terms of memory overclocking, but the scores are still pretty good and there is potential for high speed memory on this platform.

Here are some graphs showing the change:



We can see that 2250 owns in many respects, but the nature of the T2 vs T1 is great. it seems like tRCD has a great impact on write time, as it pretty evident in these charts. That can have an impact in certain benchmarks, like SuperPI.



We see that latency is affected as well.

We feel as if we are limited by what the LGA1155 platform offers in terms of memory benching, but we think that LGA2011 should bring a lot more to the table.

[siopao1984]

It is evident through our testing that these modules bring a lot to the table. They look nice, have a nice packaged fan, and some practical heatsinks. In terms of performance they overclock better than expected, and in this case are limited by the platform, and not by the quality of their ICs. That is a huge thing, because usually memory overclocking on Intel is limited by the memory itself. We saw some pretty nice overclocking without even having to change our voltage, and DDR 2200 is nothing to laugh at. A year ago most users wouldn't really think of running 2200mhz 24/7 but with kits like this it is pretty much reality.



Of course we are left with a dilemma, can 4GBs really handle everything modern day computer programs throw at it? That question can only be answered by one's own program tasking, and how heavily each of us uses the memory on our computers. We see that manufacturers are moving towards higher density kits, and basically dropping the 4GB kits off the deep end, to an overclocker that is bad news. Higher density kits are definitely taking up a larger portion of the market. It is also undeniable that the overclocking community is a very small one, and that higher density kits do have much more to offer than a lower density kit with lower latency. For overclocking we see that higher density modules are harder to clock, and in terms of benchmarking, memory density is almost irrelevant.



The truth is that density is probably more important for real-world applications like gaming, but that 4GB should cut it for most games out right now. Of course if you want the fastest system on the block, you need a kit like these G. Skills that can offer that. We do recommend the G. Skill PIS 2200mhz CAS 7 kit to anyone in the market for a great overclocking 4GB kit.