4GB(2x2GB) DDR3 for AMD 890 Series CAS Latency 7-9-7-24-2N, 1.65 Volts

This kit is optimized for the latest AMD 6-core CPUs, allthough it will also run with an Athlon/Phenom X4 or X2 processor.

Qualified Motherboards List on august 10 2010:

• ASUS M4A89TD PRO
• ASUS M4A89GTD PRO
• ASUS M4A88TD-V EVO-USB3

The reviewer had no big hopes to stabilize any ram kit over 2000mhz on the AMD platform, but This G.Skill Flare kit made it pretty easy.

For the hardcore gamer this is a very cheap alternative. The kit only works on the Asus boards, mentioned on the packaging of this kit. Testing the G.Skill on a few other mainboards had lots of issues. Not even Gigabyte's latest Gigabyte GA-890FXA-UD7 was able to boot at 1600mhz Cas 6. Cas 7 had no problems.

In case you are building an Asus AMD motherboard based setup, this G.Skill 4gb kit is a perfect match. Even though it might be a bit overkill as the 2000mhz tests have shown to be not so efficient as the lower clock speeds. A 'normal' user won't benefit much from these sticks and you are probably better off with the lower clocked Flare kits.

Test Setup:

• Mothberboard : Asus Crosshair IV
• Power Supply : OCZ ModStream 700W
• Processor : AMD Phenom II X6 1090T
• Water Cooler : Corsair H50

Performance results

The sweet spot for AMD is still at the 1800Mhz mark. Running Cas 8 would yield similar results as 1600 Cas 6. Of course Cas 6 is overall fastest, the timings at Cas 8 give nicely balanced performance for the buck.

Compared To:

Corsair Dominator TX2 Hyper

Conclusion:

The kit that G.Skill offers here is impressive. The reviewers had no stability issues or anything. With the right motherboard, you can easily achieve 2000 MHz C7 within seconds without the need for manual tweaking and extreme overclocking.

The performance gain you'll achieve in-between DDR3 1333 MHz and this 2000 MHz kit is small, especially with an overclocked system the differences are trivial. It's better to spend your money on a faster CPU.

Overclocking:

There's certainly room left for extra performance, the reviewers reached 2200MHz CAS8 @ 1.65 volts without any major issues. Anywhere between 2000 and 2200 MHz is the maximum that can be achieved with this memory depending on the max baseclock your mobo is capable of.

Test Setup:

• Motherboard : ASUS M4A88TD-V EVO-USB3
• CPU : Phenom II X6 1090T
• Video Card : Radeon HD5870
• PSU : 1200 Watt BFG
• Display : Dell 3007WFP
• OS : Windows Vista x64-bit

Benchmarks:

Memory Read test, Memory Write test, Transcoding over the CPU or GPU, Multi-threaded Video Transcoding H.264, ZLib CPU test, CineBench 11.5, Far Cry 2 , 3DMark Vantage.

Compared to:

The memory kit was compared to (the same or other?) memory with various timings. Thare are also lots of processors in the charts.