Ever wondered how 12GB of DDR3 would perform in your system? Ever heard of hexa-channel? Triple channel twice!

Product on Review: DDR3 GAMING EVO ONE HEXA-CHANNEL
Manufacturer and Sponsor: GeIL
Street Price: Unknown

I’ve had previous experience of using GeIL memory, but this was back in the DDR1/2 days. Brands like Corsair and OCZ seem to dominate the European market and smaller brands such as GeIL aren’t given as much coverage which is a shame, because if you take a look at the GeIL website they have an abundance of memory products and multiple awards.

I had the pleasure of recently checking their booth out at CeBIT and the memory being showcased looked impressive. In particular I was excited to get some of the EVO ONE modules into the test rig and see how it performs. Today the GeIL DDR3 EVO ONE Hexa-channel kit is under the spotlight, if you haven’t heard of hexa-channel before its simply triple channel x2.

The DDR3 EVO ONE modules are specifically designed for the X58/Intel Core i7 platform. The kits come available in C7, C8 and C9 latencies, giving plenty of choice but what I like above all things is that this kit comes with the DBT stamp on it. Signifying that these modules have had the die-hard burn-in reliability tests performed on them. Something which I briefly mentioned in the GeIL CeBIT article earlier last month.

Specifications
– Available in 12GB (2GBx6) Hexa Channel Package
– Available CAS: 7-7-7, 8-8-8 , 9-9-9
– 240 pin, Non-ECC, Un-buffered DIMM
– Working Voltage CL7&8 : 1.6V/1.65V CL9 : 1.5V/1.6V
– Heat Spreader EVO ONE heat-spreader with MTCD Technology
– DBT (Die-hard Burn-in Technology) Enhanced
– Lifetime Warranty

Packaging

The DDR3 EVO ONE kit comes in a rather distinctive box, it certainly weighs quite a bit too – remember there are 6 modules inside this box.

Upon opening the box we find all 6 modules enclosed in transparent plastic casing, good to see that this doesn’t require a pen knife to open as quite a lot of packaging seems to be these days.

Closer Look

First impressions of the memory – they look relatively large compared to another other module I’ve dealt with in previous experience but nevertheless they look really elegant with those featured aluminium heatsinks attached. Our DDR3 EVO ONE modules use the GeIL MTCD (Maximised Thermal Conduction & Dissipation) Cooling System which as I have said incorporates aluminium heatsinks and a heatpipe running along the top of the circuit board and heat dissipates through those silver fins. The initiative behind this design is that case fans and in particular top-down CPU cooler type fans will push heat away and remove unwanted temperatures, even if the heat is circulated around the case this is better from the memory aspect, with good airflow inside the case, this won’t be an issue as such anyway.





All modules look great and the quality of metal used seems to be good. The only concern some may have is the height of such memory could interfere with the CPU Cooler. The DDR3 EVO ONE modules are actually a further 3 cm’s bigger than the traditional memory module making them 6 cm in height. So if you are having trouble right now with standard sized modules, the EVO ONE’s are definitely a no go.

Testing

We’ve taken a good look at the EVO ONE modules, the specifications and mentioned briefly the design of such a kit – now its time to see these bad boys perform! In order to ascertain the performance of this kit its best if we execute as many benchmarks as possible to determine good overall performance.

Whilst in the process of doing this, the EVO ONE modules will be compared to two other kits that I have recently tested. OCZ Platinum DDR3 PC3-10666 9-9-9-24 and Mushkin PC3-10666 -7-7-7-24 triple channel kits. The following are the benchmarks that will be completed.

EVEREST Ultimate v5.30
SiSoft Sandra
PCMark Vantage
Street Fighter IV Benchmark

Test Setup
Processor: Intel Core i7 920
Motherboard: ASUS X58 P6T Deluxe
Memory:
GeIL EVO ONE PC3-12800 DDR3 6x2GB 8-8-8-28
OCZ PC3-10666 DDR3 3x2GB 9-9-9-24
Mushkin (3x2GB) DDR3 PC3-10666 7-7-7-24 Silverline
GPU: ATI Radeon HD5870
PSU: Antec Signature Series 850W



Below are the CPU-Z screenshots of the CPU, memory and SPD settings after modifying the CAS timings and speed in the BIOS. As you can see the modules are set at 800MHz (1600MHz) and are ready to go!

EVEREST Ultimate

“EVEREST Ultimate Edition is an industry leading system diagnostics and benchmarking solution for enthusiasts PC users, based on the award-winning EVEREST Technology. During system optimizations and tweaking it provides essential system and overclock information, advanced hardware monitoring and diagnostics capabilities to check the effects of the applied settings. CPU, FPU and memory benchmarks are available to measure the actual system performance and compare it to previous states or other systems.”

So EVEREST not only gives us up-to-date system diagnostics information but also allows us to benchmark the EVO ONE modules giving read, write, copy and latency ratings. Comparing these results to the other branded memory will give us a good understanding of how much faster these sticks are.

As you can see from the above EVEREST results, the EVO ONE kit is superior to both brands on the test bench, in each of the phases the GeIL offering pushes right forward. Such an increase in figures will transfer to some noticeable performance increase within the Windows environment.

GeIL EVO ONE (Everest version different to others because of release dates etc. More detail and additional support for chipset given in v5)



Mushkin



OCZ

SiSoftware Sandra

“SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software.
Sandra is a (girl) name of Greek origin that means “defender”, “helper of mankind”. We think that’s quite fitting.
It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc.”

SiSoft Sandra also offers system information, but as well as this it gives greater control over the testing of other elements within the system. We will only be concerned with the memory benchmarks within Sandra, there are three different benchmarks to choose from inside the memory category, I have chosen to go along with the ‘Memory Bandwidth’.



Again in similar fashion, the GeIL kit accelerates past both our test kits. Leaving smoke behind might I add. Almost 10GB/s more in each of the Int and Float tests is really impressive, this kit has plenty of punch.

PCMark Vantage

“PCMark Vantage is a PC benchmark suite designed for Windows Vista offering one-click simplicity for casual users and detailed, professional grade testing for industry, press and enthusiasts.

A PCMark score is a measure of your computer’s performance across a variety of common tasks such as viewing and editing photos, video, music and other media, gaming, communications, productivity and security.”

PCMark and 3DMark are highly respected within the community as the benchmarking giants giving a thorough analysis of the full system. Enthusiasts rely upon these two applications from Futuremark for comparing against one another’s computers to determine by a score rating how good a system is based on all of the components.



Quite shockingly the EVO ONE kit seems to fall way behind both the OCZ and Mushkin triple channel kits.

Street Fighter IV Benchmark

http://downloads.guru3d.com/Street-Fighter-IV-Benchmark-download-2310.html

“Test whether your hardware is up to scratch for the PC release of Street Fighter 4. Capcom has released Street Fighter 4 PC benchmark tool, allowing you to test how well the fighter will run on your computer or if you simply want to oggle it in motion. The 397MB download contains several bouts, filled with hadoukens and kicks to the face. You can also rate your system the old-fashioned way — against the requirements. A tool which allows you to measure the performance for your PC.”

Street Fighter IV is a fairly new release and will benchmark your system at the cost of a small download. It’s a good tool to compare our modules against one another in the gaming arena.






The results above, quite clearly show that there is hardly any difference between each of the kits. These kind of results aren’t going to make much of a difference to the human eye. Nevertheless though, its another win for the GeIL Hexa kit.

Overclocking

There is speculation as to whether such a large capacity of RAM can impede the overclock within a system. The ASUS P6T Deluxe motherboard is a classic lover of overclocking so it will be a good indicator as to how far we can take our six modules.

The overclocking test was performed by simply removing speedstrap from the equation and increasing the BCLK on the Intel Core i7 processor inside the BIOS. They performed and responded to the overclock very well. I didn’t hang about, the first (and furthest) overclock I could take the EVO ONE’s to was 1800MHz. To do this, I had to stick them on C9 and ramp up to BCLK 150 which sat the CPU at 3GHz. This 200MHz overclock pushed the modules to 900MHz and allowed the int and float results for the memory bandwidth benchmark in SANDRA to increase significantly. (See below). 3GB/s was achieved due to the speed increase, with the RAM now at 1800MHz we are sitting comfortably in the 30GB/s zone.



Unfortunately though this was the farthest I could take the kit. I did try tinkering with the CPU and DRAM voltages to encourage a little more out of the EVO ONE’s but my efforts were in vain. With the time and patience bigger increases in speed are certainly possible but for the purpose of this review, the overclock achieved was more than satisfying. This represents a pleasant 12% increase. Not too bad at all!

Conclusion

Whilst GeIL may not be the most popular brand out there for RAM, from this review they have shown that they should be up there with the giants of memory. Right from the packaging to the overclocking, this kit has a lot going for it. At the rated speeds, the EVO ONE kit gives rewarding performance and even more so with a 12% overclock that I achieved.

Of course this kit is only going to be beneficial to those on a 64-bit platform, utilizing such a large volume of RAM and bandwidth. They are ideal for users who multi-task regularly, indulge in habitual graphic and rendering work and need that extra boost for gaming. The last thing you want when completing any of these tasks is for the system to hang, or even worse… crash!

I was unable to find a price for this kit, but based on a GeIL EVO ONE 6GB kit that cost around the £240 mark, the 12GB kit won\’t be too far away.

If you want a kit that is stable, has the capacity to see you through demanding operations and have the cash then the EVO ONE 12GB DDR3 kit is a great choice. Hexa-channel kits are new to the market, and will I am sure prove ever popular as time passes by. Having all six modules allocated in two sets of triple channel maximizes bandwidth and that can only be a good thing. Based on the performance, stability and other great qualities, the EVO ONE hexa-channel kit recieves the Vortez Silver award.

Pros
+ Massive bandwidth
+ Stable
+ Good overclocker

Cons
– Height on heatsinks could be problematic
– Big price

We would like to thank GeIL for providing this sample. You can discuss this review on our forums