Verdict: Reasonably overclockable and great value for money.

Wanting to overclock your CPU as far as possible doesn't necessarily mean that you need memory that sounds like an American wrestler (ahem, OCZ), and is accompanied by heatsinks that wouldn't look out of place at the Santa Pod Raceway.

With Corsair's high-end Dominator memory stealing the headlines, it's easy to forget about the more modest offerings from the company. Corsair's XMS2 memory is effectively one step up from the 'naked PCB' Value Select range and, at £66 for 2GB, it's among the cheapest RAM in this Labs test. This doesn't mean that it's the poorest kit in the test, however. The Corsair kit boasts relatively tight latency timings of 4-4-4-12 and, as it's PC2-6400, a rated speed of 800MHz.

To confirm the memory's budget credentials, it's only rated as needing 1.9V, so it will produce less waste heat than beefier kits at stock settings. That said, with a decent case, you shouldn't need to worry too much about heat, and when we raised the memory voltage to 2.2V, the Corsair was able to run much faster. With the latency timings untouched, the kit was happy to run at 970MHz. When we slackened the timings to 6-6-6-18, the Corsair RAM happily ran at 1,030MHz.

In terms of value for money, this Corsair kit is one of the best in the Labs test. It's an excellent choice for anybody building a PC on a tight budget who wants to try a little overclocking.

• PSUs - 14th July 2008
• Multi-GPU graphics - 20th June 2008
• CPU water cooling - 17th June 2008
• Hard disks - 20th March 2008
• Audio hardware - 29th February 2008
• Graphics cards - 24th January 2008
• CPUs - 21st December 2007

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