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During my recent trip to California, Corsair hooked me up with some of the DDR2 and DDR3 Dominators. Prior to this I have more or less stuck with OCZ since my DDR1 days however I simply couldn’t pass up these sticks. For the following week I was jittery in anticipation, these sticks had the potential to really unlock my DDR2 platform. My CrossFire benching has jumped onto the DDR3 bandwagon however my SLI platform is still utilizing a 780i motherboard, hence all my excitement. So how do these sticks hold up? Are they worth they price tag and wicked heatspreaders?

Packaging and First Impression

My DDR2 Dominators didn’t come packaged in a retail package however they did come with the Dominator Airflow fan array and complete heatsinks. The PCB used in Corsair Dominators is purposely nearly half an inch taller than necessary. This extra large PCB features unique conductive paths feeding into the top of the PCB where a dedicated finned heatsink resides solely to cool the PCB. Most memory modules simply have heatsinks for the memory modules which requires the PCB to vent all it’s heat through the memory modules and into the heatsink. Dominators have heatsinks for both the memory chips and the PCBs, helping to maintain cooler operating temperatures and increasing reliability. Clad in these hefty black heatsinks, the memory kit just demands attention.

Dominator Airflow

DDR2 gets notoriously hot when overclocking with high volts. In order to prevent premature part failure, airflow over the memory modules is recommended. Normally I would simply slap a 120mm fan over the heatsinks however Corsair has gone an extra step and included a heatsink that clips onto the DIMM slot clips. Unlike other memory fan sets, the Corsair fan set has thumb screws in the top of the unit so that they don’t rub up against close graphics cards.

Testbed and Tests

Due to the unfortunate demise of my QX9650, I had to perform these tests with my backup Xeon 3040 processor. Limited to a 7x multiplier, this knocked any performance testing out the window and restricted me to solely performing bandwidth tests. This also explains the use of the stock fan, the processor was below 2900MHz the entire time. Don’t worry though, once I receive my replacement QX9650 I will be performing high speed 8800GT SLI testing on the 780i. This should give these sticks a chance to really flex their muscles.

• CPU: Xeon 3040 1.86GHz 2MB L2 Cache
• MB: EVGA 780i
• GPU: Gigabyte 8800GT 512MB SLI
• HDD: Seagate 7200.10 300GB
• PSU: OCZ 700w GameXStream
• Cooling: Intel 65nm stock fan

Results

I simply ran Everest’s Memory Bandwidth tests at each setting and recorded the average of three runs. Stability was established with dual Super Pi 32M runs. I would consider these speeds to be “bench stable” but for 24/7 use the clocks would most likely need to be dropped slightly. There is a lot of performance left to be gained from tweaking each sub-timing within the BIOS, I left them on auto to represent an average users experience and partly due to lack of time. I have seen 10,000+MB/s reads and 9000+MB/s copies/writes.

Conclusion

If you can stomach to pay what seems to be an arm and a leg for DDR2, Corsair’s PC2-8888C4 Dominators bring the performance. These tests don’t even do these sticks justice however time constraints kept me from tweaking each voltage and timing setting for maximum performance. Higher FSB and tight sub-timings will let these sticks really scream. Given the price of these sticks I would suggest only those few users interested in bleeding edge overclocks pursue these sticks but your efforts will be well rewarded. I didn’t record the run but with only 2.3v I was able to get 940MHz 3-3-3-9-2T stable through Super Pi 1M, quite substantial and hinting at a possible 1000MHz 3-3-3-9-2T run in the near future. If you need high speed DDR2 at all costs, look no further than Corsair’s PC2-8888C4 Dominators.

Pros

• Fantastic low voltage performance
• Scales incredibly well with voltage
• Offers huge overclocking potential

Cons

Final Score: 8.5/10

Note: Unrealistic but if the price was slashed in half these would score a 10/10. Lost points solely due to price which must be factored into the decision. You get what you pay for here, top bin DDR2 topped by nothing else.