Team Xtreem is a name many Atomicans would be familiar with; we sang their praise back when 800MHz kits were the must have piece of kit with your E8600 C2D CPU. Team offered a lifetime warranty, a good binning process that guaranteed far better clocks than those printed on the box and most importantly, they looked great.
Jump forward to today, and Team Group are keen to show relative newcomer G.Skill that they haven’t lost their touch. Today we look at a new kit from Team, and it’s still bearing the same name as it was all those years ago – Xtreem.
Enabling XMP in BIOS will give you the 2600MHz CL10 clock as seen in the specifications above, but that isn’t important: what we want to know is what else this kit can do. Taking manual control we pushed our poor i7 3770K to take us further, remembering 2600MHz is already a very high frequency for the Intel IMC.
Booting at 2800MHz with cache timings of 11-13-13-34 didn’t seem to be too much of a problem. We simply had to increase the RAM voltage from 1.65v to 1.8v, easy enough. Taking the RAM further proved difficult, however, even increasing the IMC voltage to 1.05v (up from 925mv) didn’t give us any joy, nor did pumping 1.9v into the RAM itself. We aren’t sure if it was the kit refusing to take us further, or the IMC on the new Intel Ivy Bridge platform, but given we hit a stable clock of 2800MHz on this kit with nothing more than passive cooling, we think it’s safe to say this kit has the goods.
If you want a kit that has a lifetime warranty, overclocks like the clappers, has a “moderate” heat sink size and comes in dual or quad channel, this kit is as good as it gets. There is one small problem however, and that is the price tag. We don’t have a concrete price confirmed for Australia yet, but our educated guess is we will see this kit online for around $500, meaning this is a piece of hardware reserved for serious overclockers, or your PC user from 2007 who hasn’t noticed the average price of RAM in 2012.
