Hands-on Kingston HyperX PC3-14400 2GB Memory Kit

The world of DRAM production is a cut throat business and Kingston has become one of the best memory technologies out there, this is the Kingston HyperX PC3-14400 2GB Memory Kit.

The performance of this 1600MHZ DDR3 Kit has allowed overclocking to get a lot easier since the memory speeds aren’t the bottleneck.

Tweak Town have given Kingston’s memory kit a hands-on review and in their final thoughts they had this to say:

DDR3 memory is now starting to show its true colors. Yes, at this stage it’s more expensive, but for the ultimate system experience, for those who want top performance and overclocking, then DDR3 based systems are the way to go. DDR2 based systems just can’t clock as high due to a bottleneck in the DDR2 bus; 1200MHz is the limit, and unless something happens (die shrinks or super high yields) DDR3 is set to take over quite convincingly as the overclocking memory of choice.

Kingston’s HyperX memory range has really come of age; its performance is extremely impressive, as well as its ability to overclock. After all, it may be rated for 1800MHz, but remember that 1333MHz is the official speed recognized by JEDEC. NVIDIA has its SLI ready recommendations that are overclocked profiles, so beyond 1333MHz is an overclock. With that said, 1800MHz is a quite a massive jump.

Kingston already has its 2000MHz line coming soon, so stay tuned for a review of this up against the SLI-ready memory. How well it performs may impact your buying decision.

Read the 7 page hands-on review.

Patriot’s new DDR3 1866MHz memory kit vs. OCZ 1600MHz parts

This is the new Patriot Viper DDR3-1866 2GB Memory Kit and it’s Intel’s latest push at making the Core 2 line-up even more attractive, its quite fast and these are some of the top clocking DDR3 modules available on the market, but you will pay for it. With XMP you can overclock without the worry of voiding warranty. Tweak Town have given Patriot’s new DDR3 1866MHz memory kit a ten page hands-on, they have also compared them to some high-clocking OCZ 1600MHz parts.

In their final thoughts they said “Patriot has managed to impress us on a number of occasions, and the new Viper Fin DDR3 memory is extremely impressive to say the least. In fact, it managed to achieve some pretty high scores while keeping the voltages at the moderate level. Most boards will be able to supply 1.9v to the DDR3 memory bus without much effort, but it’s when we need beyond 2v that we start to see things getting interesting. Cooling needs to be improved and the boards get a bit more selective.

The Viper Fin modules were extremely well designed for the cooling aspect; while we didn’t have our temperature gun on hand for this review (it arrived after testing), the touch test at full load when overclocked was extremely good as it was only mildly warm. With good case flow these modules will cool themselves quite nicely.

As for price and availability, at the time of the review we weren’t able to find many vendors with these modules, but they should start to appear pretty soon. As for price, they are on the high side, but for modules of this speed caliber, you’re naturally going to pay a premium.”

Read the ten page review.