My first intent was to use this same CPU on the Gigabyte GA-8N-SLI motherboard for the overclock portion of testing. However, that particular motherboard did not let me reach a CPU front side bus of 225 before failing to POST. Without getting to far off topic, that motherboard and this CPU obviosusly have some kind of incompatibility when Overclocking is concerned. There is no problem whatsoever with this CPU and the Intel 955X based Asus P5WD2 Premium, as we'll see in a moment.  As I ramp up clock speeds I will not have the luxury of picking my own memory bus speed, I'll be completely at the mercy of the system bus dividers.

     But it looks like those system dividers are set just right!  Starting at the recommended 2.1 volts, the timings dialed in to where Corsair has verified testing up to the 675MHz mark. After that, I was on my own to find the 'sweet spot' of operation. Buffered Sandra scores continue to take the expected rise as the CPU front side bus and raw Megahertz climb into the 4GHz range. Science Mark also shows a favorable increase in bandwidth! Though I was able to get 868MHz out of the memory, the timings are so relaxed that a much lower 780Mhz memory speed posts almost as impressive Science Mark 2 scores.

     Conclusion.......

     Corsair has once again delivered an amazing product. Though the SPD default of the TwinX1024A-5400UL kit has very relaxed timings, Corsair readily supplies a voltage/latency combination that has been verified through their own in house testing. Certainly, the tests results obtained using the nForce4 SLI Intel Edition chipset were not limited by the memory modules. Rather, the chipsets inability to handle asynchronous CPU/memory clock speeds efficiently was the culprit. With the nForce4 SLI Intel Edition chipset, the test and benchmark's ran at a default configuration were just as stable as those obtained while running the memory at higher speeds. So, overclocking is still a possibility!

     The true potential of this low latency memory was realized with the 955X chipset. By starting with such low timings, we have a very large amount of headroom to play with as we take our CPU front side bus higher and higher. While overclocking with an Intel chipset, the memory speeds do remain largely at the mercy of the chipset multipliers. However, the set of 5400UL memory did not force us to use the slowest of the memory speeds selectable. If only this kit was available with 2x 1GB modules.