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Kingston HyperX DDR3 1600MHz CL9 |
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Written by Vladimir Dimitrijevic
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Friday, 06 February 2009 |
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 In a vast amount of offered RAM modules, Kingston modules were mentioned very often and that doesn’t come as surprise since more than 30% of all produced memory modules are signed by Kingston. Kingston’s memory brand HyperX was reserved for fastest and priciest RAM modules, but since there are more memory manufacturers than ever before, Kingston decided that it is time to introduce HyperX brand to mainstream market.
We already mentioned that transition to Core i7 platform is not rational decision for most of us. Main reason is price, and the CPU itself is not the only reason. Cheapest Core i7 920 CPU costs around 260€, good X58 motherboard costs around 260€ and price for triple channel DDR3 kit that operates on 1600MHz is around 220€. When all numbers are summed up we can only laugh on the other side of our faces. Simply put, performances are great but price is too great. Fortunately, IT industry is one of the fastest growing industries on the world and we already have accessible Core i7 motherboards . Still there is problem of good and accessible DDR3 triple channel kit.
Kingston HyperX DDR3 1GB KHX12800D3/1G isn’t kit memory but with its price and performances it can overcome some of its single module memory limitations. Price of single memory module is around 45€ so you can buy three of those 1GB modules and spend less than 135€ on triple channel DDR3 memory that operates on 1600MHz. Kingston HyperX KHX1280D3/1G operates on voltage from 1.7V to 1.9V and 1600MHz. Nevertheless after some time spent with these modules, we concluded that they can operate even on 1.64V. Manufacturer latencies are 9-9-9-27 for KHX1280D3/1G but on BIOSTAR X58 motherboard we managed to achieve 8-8-8-20 on mentioned 1.64V and 1600MHz (800MHz actually). Which is nice! Additional plus is the fact that we didn’t go over 1.65V that Intel declares as dangerous for Core i7 CPUs. All modules worked stable despite the fact that they were picked randomly and didn’t came from a kit. This result is tribute to uniformity of Kingston’s manufacturing process when it comes to HyperX modules.
Cooling of KHX1200D3/1G modules is done with traditional blue HyperX aluminum coolers and instead of thermal paste, thermal strip was used. Memory chips were signed by Samsung. Chips are in FBGA format and are located on one side of PCB. Since single ship has capacity of 128MB there are 8 of than on each module. Even when they were overcloked, modules didn’t heat up too much.
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