G.Skill DDR3 2200 MHz C7 PI memory review - Final Words & Conclusion

The Verdict

Memory like shown today is targeted at such a small audience, extreme overclockers, tweakers, PC build show-offs and performance enthusiasts. In other words, the Guru3D audience ;)

As such I immediately have make very clear that purchasing memory like this makes no sense value wise. The performance gain you'll achieve in-between say DDR3 1600 MHz and this 2200 MHz kit is small, especially with an overclocked system the differential is trivial. The money invested in faster memory would be wiser to spend on a faster processor. But you know what, that's just not the point. The guys and girls that purchase memories like shown today already have the scrumptious motherboard, the fastest processor and fastest graphics card on the planet that money can buy-- and they want to top it off with the world's fastest memory. And if you are that person, yeah then this is the memory you could be looking for.

You might be wondering, why do they love the overclocked and high-end kit so much here at Guru3D.com ? You need to consider this: say you overclock the processor which adds 30% performance, overclock the memory which adds 10% performance, overclock the GPU which adds 10% performance then that's where things get interesting (and sure -- more complicated). But the accumulation of these factors make the PC stunningly fast -- and that's what tweaking is all about and thus driving the enthusiast audience. But sure, I can not justify products like these in terms of money.

Now granted, when you want to use memory like this you'll need to understand the tweaking and overclocking basics or at least know hot to manage and cope with a couple of tweaks. It's not rocket science at all but you can't pop the memory in, flick a switch and expect it to run at 2200 MHz, no Sir. You'll need to tweak the PC a little, play around with the base clock. But after fooling around like 10 minutes you do not only have a massively overclocked system, you'll learn that this memory runs at 2200 MHz CAS at 1 1T command rate with 1.65 beautifully.

The Timings on this memory are a little weird though, CAS7 is as advertised but then you immediately drop to 7:10:10:28 -- fortunately once the kit is all setup the performance in still incredible.

Now if you plan to purchase this memory, obviously we must point you to a Core i7 860 or preferably 870 processor, you really want the 2:12 memory ratio in order to make good use of the XMP profile and to get the memory working spiffy and all sexed up, mind you that your motherboards preferably needs to support XMP as well. If that is not the case, then you'll have to select and configure everything manually in the BIOS yourself.

• With a Core i7 750 you'll need to work hard on overclocking in order to get close to 2200 MHz.
• With a Core i7 870 we had the memory up and running much faster.

We tested the memory on both an eVGA P55 Classified 200 and the MSI Big Bang Trinergy (new model P55 G80). We had to tweak a little more with the Trinergy, but in the end the memory works well at both tested platforms.

We also like to note that the memory itself will go even a little higher. When we fired off a slightly more extreme 1.7 volts at it -- it allowed us to go to 2300 MHz just as well at advertised timings. Finding the limit however is a really time consuming task, and we'll happily hear your experiences in our forums.

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The bottom line: G.Skill's DDR3-2200 CAS7 memory is intended for an incredibly small audience, but if you are a hardware tweaker you might as well be a match for this kind of memory. The results are there and the memory will definitely not disappoint, but it's not easy to setup memory. As you have seen, we reached over 20GB/sec read transfer rates in memory -- considering this is dual-channel and not triple channel memory, that fact is amazing. G.Skill tops off the memory with a lifetime warranty. As such we like to really recommend this memory as a tweakers essential -- but only if it meets your needs, requirements and budget of course.