14 DAY TRIAL // Remember the OCZ DDR2 PC2-9200 FlexXLC Edition Dual? It is available and you can find it in stores for ?499 to ?530. That being said, what's interesting about these sticks is that they can use both conventional air but also water as coolant. PC 9200 standard translates into 1150MHz with 5-5-5-18 timings at default. And as always with OCZ when they roll out a new pair of sticks, there's always someone crazy enough to test the life out of them.
This time, guys at Theinquirer were sent a pair of FlexXLC memory modules. And of course, they wanted to find out just how fast can these sticks run when they are only aircooled. And the sticks proved worthy of the OCZ name.
To reach 1280MHz, the voltage was steadily increased from 2.3V 2.5V. That posed no problem for the EVGA 680i Premium motherboard which is indeed a very overclocking-friendly piece despite some known BIOS bugs. The board is in fact a variant of the reference board coming from Nvidia but it comes with better cooling and ergonomics. However, at high speeds, the board gets a little too hot so you'll have to consider replacing your northbridge cooling devices with more capable ones and equip them with fans.
OCZ's PC2-9200 FlexXLC memory actually worked at 5-5-5-18 settings at all time without any additional cooling. And it delivered the most impressive numbers ever. It seems it doesn't need any water cooling or even active air cooling but it's a safe assumption the fact that with some added cooling, it could go even faster (there are already sticks based upon the Micron D9 that can reach DDR2-1400 when highly overclocked but they are being actively cooled all the time because the extremely high voltage ~3V translates into a lot of heat). So I guess that a pair of water cooled OCZ sticks that can cope with something like 2.8-3.0V could reach record-breaking frequencies. It's just a question of time and luck.