Super Talent goes to 1200 MHz+

Review: PC2-8000 T1000UX2G4 2GB memory kit

This was
the first time we had a chance to play with Super Talent memory. The company is
trying to get a piece of the enthusiast and overclocking market and it has to compete
with Corsair, OCZ, Kingston and other big names. Yesterday it released a 4GB
memory kit for gamers and you can read more about it here. Super
talent is all about the sexy overclocker memory and we tried to push it its
limits. 

SuperTalent T1000UX2G4 PC2-8000 memory works on 1000MHz with 4-5-4-15 timings, and the kit comes with 2x1GB memory modules. The memory supports EPP
and the EVGA motherboard BIOS recognized this memory as SLI ready.

Heat
spreaders are made of blue aluminium with "Super Talent" standing out
in polished aluminium. They work just fine and look really nice. Memory is
designed for overclocking and we find that the performance is a quite
respectable. Of course, we tried to test this memory on the now legendary EVGA 680i
SLI motherboard with an Intel Core 2 Extreme at its default speed at some
overclocking.  

We used:

EVGA 680i SLI Motherboard
Intel Conroe Core2 Extreme X6800
Super Talent T1000UX2G4 at 4-5-4-12 timings
Gainward Bliss 8800GTS
OCZ GXS 850W gameXstream

Benchmarks  

We
decided to run Super Pi first. The T1000UX2G4 memory works on 1000 MHz with
4-5-4-15 timings, but we played a little bit more, from CL3 3-4-3-9 at 800 MHz
to CL5 at 1250Mhz. Due to memory overclocking we raised the FSB and CPU frequencies
to get the best possible performance gain. The overclocked system has significantly better results. Super Pi calculations with 32MB are more than 2 minutes faster
on the overclocked machines and the memory at 1244 MHz. The time necessary to
finish up this test drops from 17m 20s at 1000 MHz, on the non-overclocked system, to
15m 15s with 1244 MHz memory and the CPU at 3.4 GHz.

Moving
from the stock rated operating voltage (2.2v) to the 2.4v, Super Talent PC2-8000
works on 1200MHz fully stable, naturally by setting the timings to 5-5-5-15. We
were able to increase clock speeds to 1244MHz but there we found some problems
during our game tests. Sandra and Super Pi tests were rock stable. 1250MHz is
the limit,and going beyond this speed we saw only the frozen Windows screen. We're certain that
with better memory cooling we would be capable of completing our tests at 1250
MHz! 

Sandra is designed to test the
theoretical speed of computer components and may not represent real world
performance. When overclocked we saw a boost of about 1000MBs in overall
bandwidth, as well as lower latencies.

Games

Overclocking does boost fremerates
in all games. Company of Heroes had the smallest gain from overclocking, but in
Quake 4 at the 800×600 resolution we saw a significant 18.2 FPS more. 200MHz
faster memory and OC CPU in FEAR will give 12FPS over default speed.

Conclusion

 

This is a great memory kit, but we still failed to find it
available. It can reach more than 1200 MHz at high overclocking settings and if
you calm yourself and stay at 800 MHz you can reach 3-4-3-9 timings. It works at 1244
MHz but we could not get it really stable in all cases, but with some extra
cooling it can be done.

It works great and with the right price it is a killer product. It has the
looks and but we could not find it any playe to buy it. That is an issue, but if
you manage to find it, you should consider it as it is a great product. It is a
great overclocker and we can easily recommend it in this flood of ultra cool
memory modules.

UPDATE: We got a letter from Super talent representatives and we finally got the price and the place where you can buy it. It will cost you around $300 in the states or about saucy €379 in Germany. You can grab the memory in the USA here.