OCZ DDR3 PC3-12800 Black Edition

System Setup:

While AMD has become a strong supporter of Linux, sadly they have not brought their AMD OverDrive (AOD) support to Linux. There is the original GPU overclocking OverDrive support within their Catalyst Linux driver, but they have yet to provide any of the OverDrive CPU support on Linux nor does it look like they will bring such support anytime in the near future. As such, all Linux overclocking needs to be done through the BIOS. With that said, if you are a Linux user, it doesn't matter really whether you are using an AOD-certified motherboard as much since you won't be able to benefit from the profiles. The AMD Black Edition CPU is also not a requirement, albeit you may be able to hit a slightly higher overclock with one when manually working the options from the BIOS.

For our testing of this OCZ DDR3 AMD Black Edition kit we used an AMD Athlon II X3 425 that was overclocked to 3.24GHz for the duration of our memory testing, an MSI 890GXM-G65 (MS-7642) motherboard bearing the newer AMD 890GX rather than the older AMD 790FX/790GX Chipset, a 250GB Seagate ST3250310AS, and the integrated ATI Radeon HD 4200 graphics. On the software side was Ubuntu 10.04 with the Linux 2.6.32 kernel (x86_64), GNOME 2.3.0., X.Org Server 1.7.6, Catalyst 10.4, GCC 4.4.3, and the default EXT4 file-system.

When overclocking the OCZ DDR3 PC3-12800 Black Edition memory we managed to top out at DDR3-1720MHz with 8-8-8 timings before the system was no longer stable, which was a modest overclock from the BIOS and that not being one of our prime interests at Phoronix. Running the OCZ Black Edition memory at DDR3-1600MHz with 8-8-8 timings was no problem at all with this MSI 890GX motherboard. We also compared its performance to when the memory was clocked slower at DDR3-1280MHz but with tighter 7-7-7 timings. Additionally, we compared its performance to OCZ's Gold Series DDR3-1600MHz memory. This OCZ Gold DDR3 memory, which was rated to run at 8-8-8 timings at 1.8V but was not geared for AMD systems, did not like the AMD processor/motherboard at those specifications. The memory ended up needing to be run at DDR3-1600MHz with 10-10-10 timings while feeding it 1.9V before it ended up liking the MSI 890GX motherboard.

For a few memory tests, we ran the Phoronix Test Suite with the RAMspeed, Stream, OpenArena, and x264 tests.