Corsair Dominator 9136C5D & 10000C5DF

Conclusion

Corsair have made this memory for those who are only considering the absoulte best performance regardless of the cost. Just below those with too much disposable income and an avid hobby for extreme overclocking. For these people there is literally nothing better that you can buy that will max out any motherboard currently on the market. OCZ does have some competing FlexXLC of a similar calibre but we've yet to witness actual working modules.

Opportunity cost still exists and the cost of that cumulative performance increase is still weighted in some respects to value for money: if a £50 after market CPU cooler provides you with £120 worth of extra CPU performance, or if another £400 graphics card provides enough FPS to fill your 30" monitor. I don't believe the additional cost to benefit ratio is nearly the same, despite the fact that memory is a fundamental system resource that every application benefits from.

The cumulative performance increase will remain from using faster memory as you increase your CPU speed and graphics performance, so it's an investment in that respect. If you are just looking to buy the best of the best then go for it because the modules provide bandwidth you simply cannot get elsewhere.

For those who have a similar disposable income and want a performance PC but don't quite care about the extreme overclocking angle, then I'd first look into which motherboard was best for memory bandwidth before I simply shelled out on high performance memory. As shown in our results that highlight the memory performance comparatively, using a P965 chipset will perform better than any super clocked nForce 680i SLI or AMD RD600, but it lacks the ability to obtain the absolute maximum from your memory modules.

For a gaming system, the P965 will obviously limit your ability to do SLI or CrossFire. The Inno3D nForce 680i SLI in particular seems to perform slightly better than the Asus Commando when we specifically reviewed them both as motherboards.

Unfortunately despite the memory being "available", you’re still going to have to find somewhere that actually sells the modules. These things make hens teeth look like raindrops in a monsoon. At the time of writing only four 2GB sets of PC-10000 in the whole of Europe.

This is because Corsair has to find enough Micron D9 DRAM chips that are capable of passing the company's stringent speed binning process. Naturally, a bell chart exists where the performance capability of the memory ICs goes from poor to great. The peak in the middle is average of what the vast majority of IC's are capable of. At the very edge are the fastest, but rarest, PC-10000 capable chips. The DRAMs used in OCZ's upcoming PC-11000 memory will inevitably be even further to the right hand edge.

As manufacturing processes evolve and the move to 70nm lithography for DDR3, this process might be used for the mature DDR2 to increase yields, reduce heat output and increase speeds. However, with the move to DDR3 at 1066MHz, then eventually 1333MHz memory speeds, is investing in ultra fast DDR2 a wise choice?

The underlying factor is that DDR3 is going to have a price premium for a long time, because manufacturing 1066MHz DDR3 DIMMs is already proving to be very expensive and there is the simple fact that new technology often commands a price premium. This situation isn't going to really change until DDR3 memory production really starts to ramp up. Also, obtaining the speeds these highest performing DDR2 memory are capable of operating at won’t be available for some time, and even if the memory is capable will the chipsets support the same level of overclocking? In all, there is still a precedent for buying a mature technology.

Obviously with negating other factors, as far as pure memory performance is concerned you cannot beat the XMS2-10000 modules simply because they have maxed out every performance motherboard we've used them in. The Inno3D did boot at 1280MHz, 30MHz above the rated 1250MHz, but this wasn't stable until we reduced the speed to 1244MHz. This combination worked together the best, because both the board and Corsair's memory have the advantage of being part of Nvidia's SLI certification programme, which promotes great compatibility between products bearing the SLI Ready logo.

Final Thoughts

If money is no object and you want the absolute best money can buy then there is simply no alternative available to Corsair's PC-10000 Dominator memory. It's how Corsair has targeted this memory and how we have skewed the final scores accordingly. You are simply not going to be concerned with the poor value score if you are thinking of buying either of these memory kits.

But for those very few who are confused and wondering what to throw a large chunk of money at in a new system, then there are just too many other factors, like motherboard choice, that overrule any pure performance increase from just memory alone. You could make some educated buying decisions and concentrate on building a more balanced system with better-value performance increases. That's not to say you don't need performance memory, because of the cumulative effects it provides as a fundamental system resource.

Corsair Dominator XMS2-9136

Corsair Dominator XMS2-10000