It is amazing to think that it was way back in July of 2001 when we first officially reached 1.8GHz with the Pentium 4 processor series. Back then the original DDR memory technology was the bees knees with CAS2 PC-2100 memory (DDR-266) coming in 256MB capacities. Today we present you with DDR3 PC3-14400 memory which operates at an amazing 1.8GHz and comes in 1024MB sticks...
Corsair memory module reviews have been few and far between over the past few years, with this being just our second review this year. Despite this we have still been very impressed with the Corsair memory modules that we have seen, as earlier this year we were able to test the DDR2-1142 DOMINATOR memory featuring that unique heatsink design. The Corsair DOMINATOR memory series was one of the first to move away from conventional heatspreaders by using actual heatsinks to cool the memory chips.
Corsair managed to pull this off very successfully with their DHX (Dual-path Heat Xchange) technology, which we will once again look at in more detail shortly. This review differs from the one written in February as today we will be looking at memory that can operate much faster than 1142MHz, rather today’s DOMINATOR memory can reach an amazing 1800MHz. Using the latest DDR3 (Double Data Rate) technology which has already officially reached 1333MHz, Corsair has been able to extract another 35% out of their DOMINATOR Twin3X2048-1800C7DF G memory modules.
Before we get too stuck into this review I would just like to point out that we did recently publish an article titled “Why is DDR3 no faster?”. In this article we explored the performance difference between DDR2-800 and DDR3-1333 memory on the Intel Core 2 Duo platform. As it turns out DDR3-1333 only offers a slight performance advantage at best and in many cases is no faster than DDR2-800 memory. However, this is not a problem with DDR3, but rather the Core 2 Duo processors which are really unable to fully utilize the bandwidth of DDR2-800 memory.
Therefore while DDR3 offers no real benefits now, it will in the future, as upcoming Intel processors are slowly released. For now DDR3 is certainly more of a luxury than a necessity and while memory than can work at 1.8GHz is amazing, truth be told it’s also very unnecessary. That said, if you are a hardcore enthusiast that likes to have the latest and greatest hardware, then these new DDR3-1800 memory modules from Corsair are going to be of interest.
