Is DDR3-2400 likely to run full speed with a locked Haswell CPU on a Z97 board?

[SteveGrabowski]

I'm running a Xeon E3-1231v3 on an MSI Z97S SLI Krait Edition board, and was wondering what my odds were like for being able to run a 2x8GB CAS 11 DDR3-2400 kit of Ripjaws X at full speed. G.Skill tech support told me I might need an overclockable cpu to do so, but I have seen Digital Foundry run DDR3-2133 at full speed on a Z97 board with a lowly i3-4130.

source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5ejBlynOV8

So surely this can't be impossible on a locked cpu. I wonder if I'm going to need to get lucky to have my 1231v3 handle DDR3-2400 at full speed, if it's a coin flip, or if I'd have to be unlucky for it not to work at full speed. I know no one can guarantee anything, but my Xeon seems to be out of a pretty good bin since it runs cool and at a low voltage under load while always turboing to the max x36 multiplier under quadcore load, x37 under tricore load, and x38 under dual and single core load.

[SteveGrabowski]

Nevermind, I bought the Ripjaws X kit F3-2400C11D-16GXM and it appears to be working at the advertised 1200 MHz (eg 2400 MT/s) at the 11-13-13-31 timings, and it was just a matter of turning on the XMP profile in my BIOS.



It gives my CPU score a 1% bump in Firestrike, which is way beyond the margin of error since I have never broken 10300 physics score in Firestrike before with this CPU and my G.Skill Value RAM 2x4GB CAS 11 DDR3-1600 kit.

With CAS 11 DDR3-1600
http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/9791585

With CAS 11 DDR3-2400
http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/9894975

So I have to say initial indications are good, though of course I'll have to see how system stability is over the long term and of course run a thorough Memtest86 test.

[GSKILL TECH]

Nice boost to Firestrike score, this is normal when upgrading from standard DDR3-1600 to extreme performance DDR3-2400.

Good to hear everything is working smoothly with that motherboard and CPU

[SteveGrabowski]

Nice boost to Firestrike score, this is normal when upgrading from standard DDR3-1600 to extreme performance DDR3-2400.

Good to hear everything is working smoothly with that motherboard and CPU

The performance difference is much bigger in actual games. The 16GB DDR3-2400 kit increased my minimum framerate almost 10% in GTA V vs what I was getting with my 8GB DDR3-1600 kit, where the core of my system is CPU: Xeon E3-1231v3, BOARD: MSI Z97S SLI Krait Edition, GPU: EVGA GTX 970 SC ACX 2.0. I also drop below 60 fps way less in Fallout 4 with the faster RAM kit. I knew it would make some difference after seeing the Digital Foundry RAM speed gaming benchmarks, but the performance gain has ended up being more than I expected. I haven't tried the new memory kit with any other games yet though.