The magic of binning
At CES, TweakTown received a gift, an engineering sample of the Patriot Viper Xtreme 5 DDR5. This is no ordinary retail kit, but a hand-selected Hynix IC designed to showcase what Patriot’s DDR5 series is capable of when everything goes right. When added to the test machine, the DIMM was identified as 8000 MHz, CAS38-48-48-84 2T, running at 1.45V. Since these DIMMs are supposed to offer more features than the average retail kit, they spent quite a bit of time trying out different overclocking settings.
At stock settings, this Viper Xtreme 5 is very impressive, sometimes outperforming DDR5-8200 kits, and certainly beating other DDR5-8000 kits, with a few odd exceptions. Add a huge Pure Wings 2 RAM fan and it’s quiet! They continue to push this kit to its limits. While they were able to tighten the timings while maintaining DDR5-8000, what really impressed them was the fully stable DDR5-8800 with slightly looser timings of 40-52-52-131-183 2T.
Let’s take a look at how this affects performance compared to XMP profiles.