High-End DDR3 Memory on the Hook

Chaintech Apogee AU1G733-18GP001

Chaintech had built motherboards in the past, but has switched to graphics cards and memory products, now called Walton Chaintech. We did not find information on the DDR3-1800 DIMMs on the Chaintech website, but at least there was an information sheet on the Apogee GT memory, which can be found here - note that it requires support for Chinese to be opened with Acrobat Reader. The product was shipped to us in a simple brown box; obviously this is not the retail package, as these look different on the Apogee GT product page.

We liked that Chaintech printed the memory timing and voltage information onto the product sticker on the back of the modules. CL8-8-8-24 timings are very much standard for DDR3-1600+ speeds, though some of the other products managed to run at CL7-7-7-21 timings at DDR3-1800 speed, and the maximum speed we could operate reliably (DDR3-1900 overclocked) required higher voltage than the HyperX DIMMs from Kingston.

Both sides of the DIMMs are covered by black coated aluminum heat sinks; the front side has a shiny blue stripe with the Apogee GT logo. Chaintech included a black heat sink module, which can be mounted onto the top of the modules once they've been installed into the target system. We found some thermal compound to assist heat transfer from the modules to the heat sink. We did not achieve better timings nor a faster maximum clock speed after adding the heat sink.

The cooler is nice, but we couldn't measure any positive impact when we used it.

The Chaintech modules are rated at conservative CL9-10-10-25 timings at DDR3-1333 speed (667 MHz). Unlike the faster settings, these only require the default 1.5 V memory voltage.

We had to set the voltage to 2.0 V to reach 900 MHz (DDR3-1800).