Test System Setup

Processor: Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 (Supplied by Intel)

Motherboard: Gigabyte P965-DQ6 rev 3.3 (Supplied by Gigabyte)

Hard Disk: 500GB Seagate 7200.9 SATA (Supplied by Seagate)

Graphics Card: 2 x MSI Radeon X1950 Pro in Crossfire (Supplied by MSI)

Cooling: Gigabyte Neon775 (Supplied by Gigabyte)

Operating System: Microsoft Windows XP SP2

Drivers: Intel INF 8.1.1.1001, ATI Catalyst 7.1 and DX9c

Our test system setup was slightly updated to the new revision 3.3 version of Gigabyte's P965-DQ6 motherboard. The main difference is all solid capacitors rather than electrolyte capacitors of the original board and it does allow for higher FSB speeds and that is only going to help the Corsair memory aim higher.

We tested Corsair Dominator against the OCZ FlexXLC with both modules running at their highest memory speeds at default timings - that would mean 600MHz for the OCZ RAM and 627MHz for the Corsair RAM. We also did tests at 800MHz with SPD timings as well as 800MHz with the tightest timings we could find - that meant 4-4-4-15 for the OCZ RAM and 4-3-3-15 for the Corsair RAM.

Let's get started and see what all these testing numbers mean when it comes to overall performance of the system.

EVEREST Ultimate Edition

Version and / or Patch Used: 2006

Developer Homepage: http://www.lavalys.com

Product Homepage: http://www.lavalys.com

Buy It Here

EVEREST Ultimate Edition is an industry leading system diagnostics and benchmarking solution for enthusiasts PC users, based on the award-winning EVEREST Technology. During system optimizations and tweaking it provides essential system and overclock information, advanced hardware monitoring and diagnostics capabilities to check the effects of the applied settings. CPU, FPU and memory benchmarks are available to measure the actual system performance and compare it to previous states or other systems.

At stock speeds OCZ and Corsair are tied across the board thanks to the same timing results. Its not till we start to play around we see that OCZ falls to the back thanks to a tighter timing setting at 800MHz from the Corsair RAM as well as an overall higher bandwidth.