With so many samples passing through my front door over the year, we quite often end up with some surprises; be it a company sending it without letting us know, or it taking a bit longer to arrive than we expected and we forget about it. For whatever reason, we ended up with a couple of kits of PC3-12800 memory from OCZ.

What happened is that it arrived around the same time as a lot of new high performance PC3-16000 and PC3-17600 kits. To no fault of OCZ’s, it did fall slightly to the back of the pack.

In wondering what we could do with the two kits and how we could work them both into a single article, I thought it was time to see how the old Tri-Chan vs. Dual-Chan debate is going on with our X58 GIGABYTE board and P55 ASRock one.

While we understand that the CPUs are different along with some of the features, we'll be trying to keep the two systems as close to each other as possible. We'll get into the finer details under our test system area, but for now let's have a look at the two kits from OCZ....