Overclocking
Overclocking is never guaranteed, so the results shown may vary from results on other memory kits. I am not recommending overclocking if you do not know what are you doing. High voltages may damage hardware and it will not be covered by warranty.
We did not increase the voltage and left it untouched at 1.35v. However, we only able to overclock the memory to DDR4-3100 which is a mere 50Mhz extra (up to 1550MHz). The BIOS on the Gigabyte Z270X motherboard was limited to DDR4-3100, there wasn’t an option for x32 (DDR4-3200). Another disappointing fact was that the BIOS did not save my manual memory timings either. I wanted to keep it to 15-17-17-35 … but in the end, motherboard auto adjusted it to memory timings of 21-21-21-52. How annoying! With such a high latency setting, this will definitely affect and impact the overall performance.
This is no fault GEIL … but rather, a problem with the BIOS on the Gigabyte Z270X Ultra Gaming motherboard.
Aida64 Memory Benchmarks
Our overclocked GEIL Super Luce 16GB at DDR4-3200 have been crippled by the high memory timings. Read speed has dropped to was 39,526 Mb/sec, while write and copy speed was slightly better at 44,977 Mb/sec and 37,930 Mb/sec respectively.
Cinebench R15
As predicted, the high memory latency adversely affected the overall performance.
- DDR4-3000 @ 15-17-17-35 = Cinenbench R15 Score: 634
- DDR4-3100 @ 21-21-12-52= Cinenbench R15 Score: 624
PCMark 8
The PCMark 8 score was slightly better at 4,227 compared to 4022 The overall score is not based on memory performance only, but a combination of CPU, VGA, storage and memory.
HyperPi 32M
Again, the high latency of the overclocked ram produced adverse results. 9m 8sec (overclocked) compared to 8m 55sec (default).
PassMark 8 Memory Performance Test
It’s getting worse. For memory performance test in PassMark 8, we got a score of 3131 (overclocked) compared to 3224 (default).
3DMark – Time Spy (default settings)
At last, we have a decent score on Time Spy. Mind you, this is mostly the graphics card at work here. Still, we managed to get a score of 5649 (overclocked) compared to 4512 (default).
*To avoid any confusion we’re talking about memory overclocking here. After several days of testing and benchmarking, we determined, it was not the issue of the memory, but rather a limitation in the BIOS on the Gigabyte Z270X Ultra Gaming motherboard.
- DDR4-3000 (1500MHz) @ memory timings 15-17-17-35
- DDR4-3100 (1550MHz) @ memory timings 21-21-12-52
