Looking for a fast DDR3 memory kit for Intel Sandy/Ivy Bridge? We test a PC3-19200 kit from the Xtreem LV series.
Product on Review: Xtreem Series LV
Manufacturer and Sponsor: Team Group
Street Price: £106inc. VAT (At time of review)
Team Group are one of the youngest memory brands around and have recently doubled their efforts to appear more prominently in the UK and EU. The name will be familiar to many and though they are not the most common brand of choice its certain that over the coming months you will see more and more of this rapidly expanding company.
Today we will be taking a look at Team Group’s Xtreem LV product range – namely the blisteringly fast 2400MHz DDR3 kit. With CAS timings of 9-10-10-28 @ 1.65v we are hoping for good things from our review sample today. The ambitious out there will be keen to know how this kit will compare to the now common 1600MHz kit. Will there be much of a performance increase? Let’s find out!
Team Group’s take on Xtreem LV.
Team Xtreem LV is the most popular overclocking and gaming gear in the LAN party. Based on the memory architecture evolution on Intel Core i7, Team raises the frequency of the Xtreem LV DDR3 by 20% from 2000MHz to 2400MHz. Also, by continuing the high frequency and low latency tradition of the Xtreem LV memory, the Xtreem LV DDR3 2400 can fully display the configuration 9-11-11-28 (tCL-tRCD-tRP-tRAS) at a low operating voltage at 1.65V without sacrificing either performance or stability. All these have witnessed the extraordinary R & D capacity and capability of Team. In addition to the unchanged genuine chip policy, Team ensures chip quality with the exclusive sorting technology to screen chips. In order to further ensure the optimal performance and flawless quality of the Xtreem LV DDR3 2400, Team applies the 24-hour burn-in test and industry-approved MemTest software to perform the OQC inspection of all modules before shipping to assure the stability and exceptional performance of every Xtreem LV DDR3 2400. The Xtreem LV DDR3 2400 from Team has a conventional 8-layered PCB design and is covered with the X-mark heat-sink labeled for the Xtreem series. In addition to the clean appearance as found in all Team Xtreem memory modules, a groove has been added to the heat-sink for power users to install fans on top to enhance ventilation.
Technical Specifications
Module Type 240Pin Unbuffered DIMM Non ECC
CL-tRCD-tRP-tRAS
9-11-11-28
10-12-12-31
11-11-11-28
DRAM Density 128×8 / 256×8 / 512×8
Data transfer bandwidth 19,200MB/Sec (PC3 19200)
Heat Sink Aluminum heat-sink
Working voltage 1.65V
Warranty Lifetime warranty
Kit being reviewed
Frequency– 2400MHz
CAS Timings – 9-10-10-28
Voltage – 1.65v
CL-tRCD-tRP-tRAS
9-11-11-28
10-12-12-31
11-11-11-28
DRAM Density 128×8 / 256×8 / 512×8
Data transfer bandwidth 19,200MB/Sec (PC3 19200)
Heat Sink Aluminum heat-sink
Working voltage 1.65V
Warranty Lifetime warranty
Kit being reviewed
Frequency– 2400MHz
CAS Timings – 9-10-10-28
Voltage – 1.65v
Packaging & Closer Look
Xtreem LV is presented in an eye-catching packet. The modules can clearly be seen through a transparent plastic cover and specifications are found on the front and back. unfortunately we have to get the knife/scissors out in order to get a closer look at the modules since the packet is sealed.
An attractive package
Taking the Xtreem LV modules out of their packaging we see that this kit sports some very large heatsinks and definitely has that aggressive visual appearance. The aluminium used for the heatsinks is very substantial – quality here is exceptional. Underneath the heatsinks the PCB can only just be seen, it would have been nice to see a matching black PCB to finish the look off – many brands are now bringing to market memory kits with black PCB to pair up with the sudden craze in dark motherboard design that seems to have hit the market.
Attractive heatsinks will compliment any system
Tall heatsinks extend above PCB
As is typical with memory the specifications label is fixed onto one side of the modules. This details the type of memory, frequency, capacity, model number and serial number. The kit we are looking at today is 2400MHz with CL-9-11-11-28 @ 1.65v.
The specifications label details different attributes
The total height for Xtreem LV is 5.3cm. The heatsinks add a further 2.3cm to the modules underneath. This could present some compatibility problems if you are using a large heatsink – something which spans out over the DIMM slots on the motherboard.
Tall heatsinks – add an extra 2.3cm to the modules
In the next section we will be testing the Xtreem LV kit in a range of benchmarks to determine performance.
Test System & Overclocking
Test system
CPU Intel Core i5 3570K (Ivy Bridge)
Motherboard MSI Z77A-GD65
Graphics MSI R7970 Black Edition
Memory Team Group Xtreem LV 8GB 2400MHz (9-10-10-28 – 1.65v)
HDD Kingston HyperX 240GB (SATA 3)
PSU OCZ 750W Fatal1ty
CPU Cooler Alpenfohn K2
OS Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 64-Bit
CPU Intel Core i5 3570K (Ivy Bridge)
Motherboard MSI Z77A-GD65
Graphics MSI R7970 Black Edition
Memory Team Group Xtreem LV 8GB 2400MHz (9-10-10-28 – 1.65v)
HDD Kingston HyperX 240GB (SATA 3)
PSU OCZ 750W Fatal1ty
CPU Cooler Alpenfohn K2
OS Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 64-Bit
Overclocking
As you can well imagine – the Xtreem LV kit we are testing today with a frequency of 2400MHz and reasonably high CAS timings and 1.65v, there isn’t a great deal of headroom to boost things even further.
Pushing this kit proved very hard indeed but this is to be expected, bearing in mind the calibre and specifications. 2600MHz with 2T-11-11-30 at 1.73v did manage to boot into Windows but the system was extremely unstable.
Establishing that a frequency overclock was not on the cards I decided to lower the latencies at stock (2400MHz) to ascertain if this can be improved upon at all. Sadly though nothing would work in my favour even with voltage increased to 1.74v
As a result, we shall be testing this kit with just the stock settings configured under XMP – 2400MHz – 2T-9-10-10-28 at 1.65v.
Benchmarks: AIDA64
AIDA64 is an industry leading system diagnostics and benchmarking solution for enthusiasts PC users, based on the award-winning AIDA64 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.
Benchmarks: SiSoftware SANDRA 2012
[i ]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.
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.
Benchmarks: HyperPI 0.99b
The HiperPI front-end is basically a program which allows selecting multiple threads of SuperPi to be run at the same time so you can test the stability and performance on multi-core machines.
Benchmarks: SuperPI 1.5
In August 1995, the calculation of pi up to 4,294,960,000 decimal digits was succeeded by using a supercomputer at the University of Tokyo. The program was written by D.Takahashi and he collaborated with Dr. Y.Kanada at the computer center, the University of Tokyo. This record should be the current world record. (Details is shown in the windows help. ) This record-breaking program was ported to personal computer environment such as Windows NT and Windows 95 and called Super PI. In order to calculate 33.55 million digits, it takes within 3 days with Pentium 90MHz, 40MB main memory and 340MB available storage.
Benchmarks: 3DMark 11 & DIRT 3
Designed to measure your PC’s gaming performance 3DMark 11 makes extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to consistently and reliably test DirectX 11 under game-like loads.
Conclusion
Team Group may not currently be the most common choice for the enthusiast but today’s review has demonstrated that they should not be underestimated.
It’s true to say that there are countless 1600MHz kits available to purchase for Sandy/Ivy Bridge from your etailer of choice and these kits are the most affordable and probably the most frequently selected. It’s fair to say that for the most-part there will be headroom to nudge the frequency/latencies up to improve performance and in turn – headroom to squeeze the most out of the kit but not everyone will be concerned with going to the trouble of establishing an overclock, tweaking in the BIOS and so on.
And this is where the Xtreem LV 2400MHz kit comes in. Straight out of the box there is a huge amount of bandwidth to be had. In our performance benchmarks this kit confirmed that a high frequency yields great results in a variety of purposes. Usually we would mark a kit down for having a troublesome overclock but since this kit isn’t designed to be tweaked in such a way it would be unfair to do so. Team Group have already, as it were, overclocked this kit and established the best settings so you don’t have to.
Priced at just over £100inc. VAT the Xtreem LV 2400MHz kit could seem quite a hike for some but bear in mind this kit is almost double the speed of the traditional 1600MHz kit which most seem to go with, you can understand why the price is what it is. If you want sheer bandwidth then it’s a worthwhile investment.
The only thing I would mark this kit down with is the height of the heatsinks. If you think that Corsair’s Vengeance are a tall order, the Xtreem LV kit is even taller. At 5.3cm in total height there could be compatibility issues with certain configurations – depending on the placement of memory/CPU socket and CPU cooler. Though the heatsinks on the Xtreem LV were touching the Alpenfohn K2 used on our test bench we were just about able to get everything installed.
Team Group’s Xtreem LV 2400MHz kit is a very fast kit. It pushes the boundaries for those using Sandy/Ivy Bridge and provides the best memory performance that money can buy. Xtreem LV comes highly recommended by Vortez and attains the prestigious Gold award.
Pros
+ Huge bandwidth
+ Fast out of the box
+ Stylish design
+ Lifetime warranty
Cons
– Tall heatsinks
+ Huge bandwidth
+ Fast out of the box
+ Stylish design
+ Lifetime warranty
Cons
– Tall heatsinks
Click here for an explanation of our awards at Vortez.net.
