The Basics:

Once out of the packaging, we can get up close and personal with the OCZ Technology PC3-12800 Reaper ULV modules themselves. As you can see from the label in the images below, we have a pair of 2GB sticks running at 1600MHz with timings of 7-8-8 and 1.5 volts. Typical DDR3 RAM running at this speed would have timings of 8-8-8 and run at 1.65 volts. Later we'll see how much of a difference this makes in performance.



Configuration and Overclocking:

The system components were first installed in an AMD based system with the following hardware:

» Intel Core i5 750 (2.66GHz) processor
» Gigabyte GA-P55M-UD2 Socket LGA1156 uATX motherboard
» nVidia Quadro FX 3400 256MB PCIe graphics card
» Western Digital 1TB SATA 3Gbps hard drive
» Silverstone Element 600 watt power supply
» Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit operating system

We initially ran into issues getting the OCZ Technology RAM to even post at stock speeds, so we went to the Gigabyte website and grabbed the latest BIOS for the 880GM-UD2H motherboard. Once that was updated, the board came right up. We had to enter the BIOS to do some manual adjustments to the timings, because the board saw them as 7-7-7-24.

As you can see these are 533MHz chips specified by OCZ Technology to run at 800MHz. Most of the modules we've seen lately have been 667MHz sticks overclocked to 800MHz. According to the chart, the fastest profile is 609MHz (1218MHz DDR3) with 8-8-8 timings. The second image shows our modules running at their stock settings. Unfortunately, these sticks do not have an XMP profile to make getting up to speed easier on system's that support this technology.



We did not get the OCZ Reaper HPC modules to overclock very much with the AMD system (1780MHz DDR3) and were certain they had a good bit of headroom in them. For a second opinion we dropped the RAM into a Core i7 setup that has plenty of overclocking headroom to see how far we could take it. This Intel setup consisted of the following hardware:

» INTEL Core i7 920 2.67GHz D0
» eVGA x58 SLI Micro
» nVidia Quadro FX1800 PCIe video card
» Western Digital 1TB SATA 3Gbps hard drive
» Cooler Master EPS 12V 750 watt power supply
» Windows 7 Ultimate 64-Bit operating system

As you can see, there was a good bit of fight left in them. We managed to get the memory speed up to about 1914MHz DDR3, and although we did have to slack the timings to 11-11-11-24 timings, we did not have to change the default voltage.