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Corsair Dominator Platinum 32GB Special Edition Torque DDR4 Memory Review

Memory by leeghoofd @ 2017-11-06

Corsair is still one of the dominant forces in the PC market, however they have widely diversified their product range over the years. From initially being just focused on memory kits they expanded their range to gaming peripherals, cooling solutions and enclosures. At Computex 2017 we even saw some early samples of upcoming "Do It Yourself" water cooling products. However, the showstopper for many of the press was the new DDR4 limited Edition memory flagship, the Dominator Special Edition Torque kits. Quite a mouthful isn't it? Two 32GB versions were introduced, both based on the Samsung B-Die ICs, With one kit being a Dual Channel version sporting two 16GB modules and the second version is a quad channel version. Thus with four times 8GB modules. What made these so special was the intriguing look the Corsair Team managed to achieve. Secondly that these are a limited edition only made people drool even more. Time to explore what the Torque hype is all about!

Memory Dividers Tested

Even though Corsair mentions that they warrant clock speeds of up to 3600MHz thanks to their IC binning, we know there's a lot more in these Samsung B-Die ICs. Take into account however we are working initially in a quad channel environment. The motherboard's layout & affiliated BIOS, plus the Processor's Integrated Memory Controller (IMC) do play a big part in the final outcome.

To focus on the raw clocking of this memory kit we loosened the timings from CAS14-16-16-35 to 16-16-16-32 2T Command Rate.

We achieved the following stable memory clocks on the AORUS Gigabyte X299 Gaming 9:

3466MHz at 1.35 volt

3733MHz at 1.4 volt

3800MHz at 1.45 volt
4000MHz required C19 timings and was still not stable for the entire benchmark suite, not even at 1.65Vdimm

This memory divider test is also interesting to see how big the performance improvement can be when one tends to opt for higher speed memory, hence why we also ran down clocked tests with the same main timings set at C16-16-16-32 2T. We really compare apples with apples at MadShrimps!

As mentioned on the previous page AIDA64 scales massively with increased memory speed and tight memory timings. Interesting to see that the 4000MHz results are lower than the 3800MHz: this is mainly due to the fact we had to loosen the main timings from CAS16-16-16-32 to CAS19-21-21-35. Even with these looser timings we could not complete the entire benchmark suite. Initially we suspected it to be the X299 combination, though with a quick retest on the Z270 with an Intel Core i7-7700K we ran into similar problems once surpassing 3866MHz mark.

In the other tests reflect the same principle, more speed in general is better, though the exotic speeds of 3800MHz and beyond are better avoided for 24/7 systems. Running these high frequencies daily put a huge strain on the motherboard and the integrated memory controller of your processor. Also the gain above 3800MHz is not as big as one expects, mainly explained due to the very loose timings of the XMP memory profile.

The Corsair Dominator Platinum Special Edition Torque show that they still got plenty of oomph under the hood. This without selecting any crazy voltages in the bios voltage tabs. How about 3800MHz running perfectly fine in quad channel through the entire test suite multiple times without any hick-up at 1.45Vdimm on X299?

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