This is my first 16GB high end kit at the M lab and I must say I was impressed how smooth it all went on the ASUS board. On my Gigabyte Z77-UD5H, and honestly with all the best effort in this world, I couldn't even get the rig to post. Big credits to the ASUS bios team.

Now let's push the voltages a bit more.  With the Vdimm at 1.725V allowed us to bench and run pi 32M at 2800Mhz C11-13-12-30 1T Command Rate. But ofcourse who is gonna bench Sandy or Ivy Bridge with 16GB of ram installed ?

So we removed two dimms and went down for a trip to the maximum IMC lane of our i7-3770K CPU. Remember this is all done on air. 8GB 2900Mhz C11-13-13-30 1T at 1.725Vdimm is not bad at all, for non enthousiast targeted sticks :)

But how about X79 ? Intel's high end platform, where we can properly utilise quad channel kits. Finding a Sandy Bridge-E CPU who's IMC can handle the Corsair's 2666Mhz box rated speeds is tough. Sadly this is the case with our Intel i7-3960X ES sample. It's IMC runs on the edge already sub 2500mhz.  Only option then: downclocking time and try set the timings as tight as possible. We stumbled upon a brick wall around 2450Mhz C9-11-11-28 command rate 1T. No matter how loose the timings were set, no matter the volts we pumped through the Dimms and/or CPU/IMC related components, upping the Bclock for more RAM MHz ran far from stable. 2450MhzC9 at 1.65Vdimm is again a pretty smooth ride in my book.

Finally a forum member asked, how do they perform on X58 ? Since you already have to pay a premium price, we opted to use the 4 Dimms iso the regular preferred triple channel setup for socket 1366 platforms. How does 16GB running at 2100Mhz C9-10-10-27 2T at 1.685Vdimm and even HCI Memtest stable at 9-10-9 2T at 1.745Vdimm sound ? Madshrimps is pretty sure, if we had a better clocking Gulftown CPU, that the Corsair Platinum kit could have easily done better. The i7 970 ES CPU we have at the [M] lab has got uber uncore problems over 3200Mhz.

Sadly no AMD FX results as the Crosshair V Formula went up to hardware heaven during a bench session.

Overclocking results can vary and are mainly dependant on several factors : the RAM kit you get, your CPU's IMC, the used motherboard and more important it's bios. Finally don't forget the little man behind the keyboard ! Ofcourse there is always some luck involved. Just for a comparison: we couldn't achieve stability with TRCD set at 12, once running speeds at or above 2800Mhz. Indonesian overclocker Hazzan has run his 16Gb kit at 2800Mhz 10-12-12-31 1T at just 1.68Vdimm.

We quickly tested our kit for max CPU-Z validation and came up with a nice 3010Mhz at C11-14-14-35 2T with 2 sticks installed.