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I had a chance to run a kit of G.Skill F3-12800CL7T-6GBPI Memory, Tri-Channel kit for Intel Core I7 CPU’s, through some tests the past few days.  Before I go into all the results I want to touch on the market for these kits.

If you do a search on Newegg you come up with 36 listings which range in price from $145.99 to $283.99 with kits  in 6-7-6-18 to 9-9-9-27 timings, and 1.5v to 1.65v. So as you can see, this range of memory has a pretty wide selection of kits for what ever you are looking for.

The G.Skill F3-12800CL7T-6GBPI kit spec’s as follows: DDR3-1600 CL7-8-7-24 at 1.5v, PC3-12800 2GBx3. G.Skill Part number is: 10051040027518. So this kit will give you 3 sticks of 2gb each for a total of 6gb.

http://www.gskill.com/products.php?index=252

You can see a list of Qualified Motherboards there. Interesting to see that there are no EVGA Motherboards listed, but I am sure that will change.

Add a few pictures of the kit and my setup which is a Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R motherboard and Intel Core I7 975EE CPU.

The PI refers to the heat spreader which for these is black, they look very nice and are not to tall to interfere with most heat sinks. They are actually about a 1/16″ taller than some of the other kits I have so its not that much. The dark blue logos look very nice on a Gigabyte board for those who want colors to match up with there rigs.

Because there are a lot of kits to pick from in this memory range I wanted to keep my tests at manufacturer spec’s for the first round and then see what I could get them to do with some RAM overclocking.

So I setup the Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R & 975EE at stock defaults and set the RAM to 1600 7-8-7-24, 1.5vdimm running on SS Phase cooling and away I went.

First screen shows these results.

SuperPi 1M – 11.766s, PiFast – 24.61, wPrime 32M – 7.375s

Memory Read: 17231 MB/s, Write: 14066 MB/s, Copy: 19550 MB/s, Latency: 40.4ns

Then I up the overclock to 4.15ghz

SuperPi 1M – 9.906s, PiFast – 30.56, wPrime 32M – 6.063s

Memory Read: 17002 MB/s, Write: 14463 MB/s, Copy: 20970 MB/s, Latency: 39.0ns

And now 4.32ghz

SuperPi 1M – 9.453s, PiFast – 19.73, wPrime 32M – 5.89s

Memory Read: 16932 MB/s, Write: 14376 MB/s, Copy: 20671 MB/s, Latency: 39.1ns

And I topped out at 4.4ghz

SuperPi 1M – 9.25s, PiFast – 19.33, wPrime 32M – 5.687s

Memory Read: 17814 MB/s, Write: 14650 MB/s, Copy: 19522 MB/s, Latency: 38.6ns

So I was able to go all the way to 4.4ghz at 1600 7-8-7-24 and at 1.5v

Now overclocking this RAM was a bit of a problem. In order to reach a speed of 1800 I had to loosen the timings to 9-9-9 which resulted in poor stability so I left everything at 1600 7-8-7 which is where this RAM seemed to like to run.

SuperPi 1M – 11.703s, PiFast – 24.34, wPrime 32M – 7.235s

Memory Read: 19000 MB/s, Write: 15569 MB/s, Copy: 21878 MB/s, Latency: 39.ons

I spent just about a full day with Memtest trying to find sweet spots but going lower in timings would usually result in noboots or errors in Memtest. Again the sweet spot for this RAM is at manufactures spec’s, imagine that

When the first sets of RAM came out for I7 CPUs a good set of 1600 9-9-9 1.65v was plenty good for any rig. Now with manufactures that are able to get better results with kits for things like timing, speed and lower volts we are getting faster, tighter RAM that runs on less voltage, this is all a good thing imo.

But it remains to be seen that tighter RAM really helps any gaming platform, office apps or general use that anyone would really notice in everyday use. But for benching platforms and high end gaming rigs you would want higher end kits anyway.

This kit fits in well with a good mid range computer for everyday use. I am a big fan of lowering volts required to run tho and that will result in less heat output, plus help to save on your power usage.

So with a nice mid priced set of RAM this kit should be good to go on any mid ranged computer, but don’t expect much RAM overclocking with it. To me if you want to run RAM faster then get a set that is rated for that. High end gaming rigs would want to use the higher speed kits, why would you put anything less in a rig you spent a lot of money on.

At a speed of 4.4ghz that I was able to achieve before I had to start loosening up timings and giving it more volts I think that fits in well with high end air cooling and good water cooling setups, just don’t expect to overclock this RAM, use it at stock and you should be very happy.

You can find this memory at Newegg.

Thank you G.Skill for the sample.