Regarded as one of the most prominent memory manufacturers, Corsair has been making memory products since 1994. For the first 5-7 years of their existence, Corsair focused on the business market of servers and workstations. Only in the last couple of years, especially since the introduction of PC-133 SD-Ram, the consumer market really became interesting for RAM development. At that time people became aware that faster ram was a worthy investment, and the overclocking market was born. In the last 5 years, Corsair has put more and more of its eggs into the basket of gamers and overclockers and has become the company all others measure their success by. Today, Corsair still makes server and workstation ram, and the so called "value-select" memory for the budget oriented consumer, but they are especially famous for the XMS memory line, which stands for "Extreme Memory Speed". Lately though their most prominent lineup lies with the Dominator series, a promising name for promising products...

Memory size : 2x 1024Mb

If you want to take a more extensive look at the specifications, Corsair provides a pdf for all of its modules online.

The specs look interesting at once, as they give a hint towards micron-equipped memory. During testing it will be revealed that this is indeed the case, as the memory keeps scaling with increased voltages.

Up close and personal

Here's a close-up of the modules out of their package:



Dominator modules impress me with their looks and technical refinement. Out of all the present heat spreading technologies for memory, DHX, which stands for Dual path Heat Exchange, still offers, in my opinion of course, the best cooling solution available, and certainly the most technically refined. Corsair refuses to speak of heat spreaders for their memory by the way, but always refers to them as real "sinks", actually removing heat, not only spreading it. Whether it's only a matter of choosing the right words I leave up to you, but they do offer the white papers online should you be interested in diving into the cooling technology and its results.

For more information on DHX technology, please visit our previous "Dominator" article


left to right : contents of the package, back of the package, back of the modules, sticker close-up ; click to open

As we already mentioned, Corsair packs their fan ensemble with these modules as well, providing you with the possibility to cool the memory down for increased overclocking potential, or to increase the voltages even further without damaging the modules, for even more overclocking fun. As always, do be careful though as warranty will be voided when you go past the rated voltages... not to mention that DDR2 is not made for 2.6 Volts, or more...



Let's have a look at the other test candidates now >