Reviewed 15 years ago: Corsair's XMS2 Dominator for extreme CPU overclocking

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With the Dominator product line (test), Corsair expanded its own RAM portfolio 15 years ago to include a premium series for overclockers and enthusiasts. The memory itself was convincing in the test, but the system configuration was tricky.

Table of contents

  1. 1 The GHz- There were also races for RAM
  2. The best RAM is useless on a lousy mainboard
  3. In practice there was no advantage
  4. Conclusion

The GHz race also took place with RAM

Like AMD and Intel, memory manufacturers fought head-to-head 15 years ago to see who could achieve the highest clock frequencies. One day after Corsair presented the DDR2 modules baptized XMS2 Dominator with clock rates of up to 1,111 MHz (effective), OCZ countered with the announcement of units with up to 1,120 MHz. In terms of timing, Corsair with CL4-4-4-12 was ahead of OCZ with CL5-5-5-15. At that time, at least 580 euros were due for two modules with a capacity of 1 GB each – they were available from 799 euros.

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Corsair Dominator
Corsair Dominator – significantly larger than standard modules
Corsair Dominator: heat dissipation in two ways
Guaranteed settings of the TWIN2X2048-8888C4DF
Dominator Airflow

To enable the high clock rates with low latencies, Corsair had to increase the voltage of the DRAM chips from the intended 1.8 to 2.4 volts. As temperatures rise with high voltage, the Dominator modules have a protruding heat sink. The cooler not only absorbed the heat directly from the chips, but was also connected to the PCB of the memory modules with thermal pads – it was supposed to also dissipate the waste heat to the cooler. Because of these two cooling channels, the manufacturer introduced the marketing name “Dual-path Heat Exchange” (DHX). But that was not enough for the cooling: Corsair added a fan module with three 40 mm fans to the top models, which could be mounted above the RAM and should provide sufficient fresh air. The manufacturer went so far that the promised clock rates and latencies were only guaranteed when the fan module was used.

The best RAM doesn’t do anything on a lousy one Mainboard

Corsair was just as specific as to the use of the fan module with regard to compatible motherboards. The manufacturer explicitly recommended the Asus M2N32-SLI Deluxe for Athlon 64 processors and the Asus P5B Deluxe for CPUs from Intel. The test revealed that these recommendations were made for a reason – no more than 1,086 MHz could be achieved on a motherboard with Intel's high-end chipset i975x. Even the recommended motherboards did not guarantee proper operation of the Dominator modules: An Asus P5B Deluxe from the editorial team was able to reach 1,111 MHz at first without any problems, only to no longer work stably at the same clock rate after an overclocking attempt. In addition, the “Front Side Bus” (FSB) generally had to be overclocked on Intel systems in order to be able to achieve the memory clock – the processor had to allow this in this case.

In practice there was no advantage

In the test 15 years ago, the Dominator memory was operated in combination with an Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 and an Asus P5B Deluxe. Since it was an Intel system, the memory required the FSB to be overclocked in order to achieve the various clock rates. Accordingly, not only the memory clock and its timing, but also the CPU frequency played a role in the benchmarks.

Corsair Dominator memory clock (MHz) RAM divider FSB clock (CPU clock) Timings Voltage 800 1: 1 400 MHz (2.8 GHz) 3-3-3-9 2.1 V 1.001 2: 3 334 MHz (3.002 GHz) 4-4-3-12 2.0 V 1.066 2: 3 355 MHz (2.842 GHz) 4-4-3-12 2.25 V 1.112 2: 3 371 MHz (2.966 GHz) 4-4-3- 12 2.4 V 1.125 2: 3 375 MHz (3.0 GHz) 5-5-5-18 2.45 V

In the theoretical benchmarks, the Dominator was able to achieve better results at full clock rate than at lower clock rates, but this was not noticeable in practice. In Quake 3, performance scaled with CPU frequency, but not with RAM clock. The theoretical benchmarks also showed that manual overclocking of the Dominator memory was not worthwhile: At 1,125 MHz, the clock rate was only marginally higher, but the timing with the CL5-5-5-18 was so much worse that there was no performance gain compared to the Default settings remained.

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Conclusion

The first modules in the Dominator series were some of the fastest DDR2 memory modules available 15 years ago. With a price of almost 800 euros (available), the manufacturer was rewarded princely, but the benefits in practice were negligible. Rather, users had to deal with incompatibilities in terms of mainboard and CPU in order to be able to operate the expensive memory at full speed. For whom the RAM actually offered advantages, there were mainly extreme overclockers, who overclocked CPUs higher due to the greater flexibility in the RAM clock and were able to post new records in benchmarks because of the minimally higher performance. Normal users could invest their money better in many places.

In the “Tested 15 years ago” category, the editorial team has been looking into the test archive every Saturday since July 2017. The last 20 articles that appeared in this series are listed below:

  • Asus & apos; first unsuccessful cooler
  • Potent cool orange from the Far East
  • The Scythe Infinity did away with other CPU coolers
  • Thermalright's first tower cooler Ultra-90
  • 125 ° C were still ok with the GeForce 7950 GT from XFX
  • Zalman made a comeback with the CNPS 9700 LED
  • The Scythe Mine Cooler was a lot cooler for little money
  • The GeForce 7900 GS was a cheaper 7900 GT
  • Intel Core 2 Extreme pushed multi-GPU setups to the limit
  • ATi's Radeon X1950 XTX was a top model for 399 euros
  • Thermalright's SI-128 was good, but not perfect
  • < li> Microsoft WHQL torpedoed Nvidia's Quad-SLI

  • An overclocked GeForce 7600 GS with 512 MByte memory
  • Intel's Core 2 Duo E6600 and E6700 did away with AMD
  • The absolute price-performance tip GeForce 7600 GST
  • The Core 2 Extreme X6800 left them all behind
  • The Zalman VF-900 Cu dominated them all
  • Three GeForce 7950 GX2 from loud to fast
  • GeForce custom designs in extra fast and silent
  • The “gamer cube” that only ventilated via the power supply

Even more content of this kind and many more reports and anecdotes can be found in the retro corner of the forum vo n ComputerBase.