Review: Team Group XCalibur RGB 16GB DDR4-3600 (TF5D416G3600HC18EDC01)

by Tarinder Sandhu on 7 December 2018, 14:00

Tags: Team Group

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qad2bt

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Benchmarks II

The benchmarks start off well but then tail off. Gaming, for example, is practically no faster on this 3,600MHz pack than the 2,667MHz set.

We wondered why this was. Digging deeper, the super-loose tRFC timing of 630 clocks, applied automatically by XMP, causes performance to drop a touch across all gaming.

In fact, latencies are poor across the board, negating the intrinsic benefits of higher-speed RAM. We'd actually prefer slower memory at lower latencies - the DDR4-3,200 stuff laced with 14-14-14-34 timings.

If you are therefore buying this set for gaming, it is not really any better than cheaper, default-speed memory, no matter what the headline figure would intimate.

The way around it would be to enter timings in manually, avoiding XMP, but that defeats the point of one-click optimisation.

Moving on to overclocking and keeping to the same 1.35V juice, we managed to increase the speed to 3,733MHz at the same timings, and 4,000MHz with even looser 19-20-21-40 speeds.