Corsair Dominator PC2-10000: Fastest DDR2

Final Words

Corsair Dominator PC2-10000 has the highest speed rating of any production DDR2 memory. Rated at a jaw dropping DDR2-1250 (PC2-10000) this Dominator meets and actually exceeds its rated specifications. Corsair specifies 5-5-5-18 at DDR2-1250 at 2.4V. Our benchmarking found the Dominator 10000 to be stable at 5-4-4-12 timings at 2.4V at DDR2-1250. There is even more good news in the fact that Corsair Dominator 10000 reaches speeds of DDR2-1315 at rated timings. This matches the highest speed ever achieved in benchmarking DDR2 memory. These facts alone definitely qualify Corsair Dominator XMS2-10000 as a very desirable memory.

There is more to this story, however. To reach these performance levels you will need to pair the Corsair Dominator 10000 with an NVIDIA 680i motherboard. You cannot achieve this performance using an Intel 975X chipset motherboard. You may be able to perform nearly as well on recent Intel P965 chipset motherboards, but that is still open to verification. In limited testing we did confirm that DDR2-1250 can be achieved on the ASUS Commando P965 motherboard, but we did not explore the highest overclock on that platform. We will be doing more with the Commando board in the near future.

There are two other top enthusiast memories - OCZ Flex XLC-9200 and Corsair Dominator PC2-8888 - that also perform very well in this same configuration. Neither memory is rated at a speed as high as Dominator 10000, but the fact is that both memories perform very well at DDR2-1250 and also reach to DDR2-1300 and DDR2-1315 respectfully on the same 680i platform. They are also both lower latency memories than PC2-10000, which means in the 1066 to 1200 range they are a bit faster than Dominator 10000.

However, at the most important DDR2-800 speed all three memories deliver 3-3-3-9 timings at 2.2V. In fact, while Dominator 10000 may be considered a higher latency memory than Dominator 8888, both these memories behave at extremely low latencies to about DDR2-1066. At that point Dominator 10000 is slightly slower and you will find at DDR2-1100 and higher you must use CAS 5 with 10000 while CAS 4 is still an option with Dominator 8888 and OCZ Flex.

In the final analysis Corsair Dominator 10000 exceeds its specs handily and performs as promised when paired with the right motherboard. If your goal is to buy the highest speed rated memory you can buy the Corsair Dominator PC2-10000 is the right choice. However, if we were doing the choosing we would opt for Corsair Dominator PC2-8888 or OCZ Flex XLC-9200. Both are rated at lower speeds, but both perform just as well or better than Dominator 10000 on the NVIDIA 680i. Both also perform much better than the Dominator 10000 on the 975X-based ASUS P5W-DH, with the OCZ Flex XLC-9200 reaching the highest speed on that platform.

There is also the reality that Core 2 Duo and AM2 really don't need the highest memory speeds to perform best. What they need is low latency DDR2-800 or possibly 4-4-3 DDR2-1067 to get the best performance possible. The unfortunate reality that we see again and again in memory tests is that the super high memory speeds are great for bragging rights and flexible overclocking, but they really don't do much for increasing actual real world performance on either the C2D or AM2 platforms.

Memory companies seem obsessed right now with higher and higher DDR2 memory speeds. There is definitely a market for these products, and Corsair, OCZ, Kingston, Patriot, Team, GeIL, Super Talent, and many other memory companies have delivered some remarkable and extremely innovative high-speed memory in recent months. We wish memory companies would become just as obsessed with producing a moderately priced 2 GB DDR2-800 kit that can perform day in and day out at 3-3-3 timings. It would be a bonus if it also overclocked to DDR2-1067 with 4-4-4 timings. With Vista performing best with 2GB of memory many will be upgrading memory as they move to the new OS. Whoever finally produces a reasonably-priced low latency DDR2-800 2GB kit will sell all they can produce.