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Overclocking

The OCZ DDR3 PC3-16000 DIMMs are already effectively overclocked to the max at their rated speeds; I did not have any luck in further overclocking them. I came close to getting them stable at 2020MHz, but they did not really want to go even that 1% faster.

I was however able to run it with tRAS of 24 versus the advertised 28 - every little bit helps :)

I did underclock them a bit to 1800MHz and gathered some results with two different sets of timings - just so that I'd have some more data for this review.

Update: OCZ contacted us, and tells us that they are able to overclock these modules on Asus, XFX and EVGA 790i boards.

Conclusion

The OCZ DDR3 PC3-16000 DIMMS do exactly what they are advertised to do - run at 2000MHz, for a PC3-16000 rating.

Mind you, current PC motherboards cannot make use of all of this bandwidth - a dual channel setup with these DIMMs is theoretically capable of supplying 32GB/sec memory bandwidth, however the processor is connected to the northbridge normally with a 1333MHz or 1600MHz FSB; and even though we pushed the FSB in these tests to 2000MHz, due to bus overhead it is literally impossible to make use of the full bandwidth of even one bank of these DIMMs.

These modules however hold a lot of promise for the upcoming Intel Nehalem and Amd Deneb processors, which have on-chip memory controllers; if they can run the memory at full speed, Deneb could get memory bandwidth of close to 32GB/sec, and Nehalem could get close to 48GB/sec - both would be much faster than the current 11GB/sec ceiling imposed by the FSB and chipset.

While most of the potential bandwidth of these modules is unused, running the modules at such high speeds does provide two  tangible benefits even now: lower latencies and the ability to overclock processors to a 500MHz FSB with a "2x" memory multiplier.

All you have to do is take a look at the benchmark results. The OCZ DDR3 PC3-16000 Platinum Edition won every test.

The OCZ DDR3 PC3-16000 DIMMs blew our previous memory speed records - they are great modules.