A few months ago, we tested Kingston’s notorious HyperX 2133 CL8. This was the best and most expensive memory money could buy at the moment. Since competition hardly rested on their laurels, it was expected for more manufacturers to appear on the market with 2133 MHz models. The reputed manufacturer such as Kingston wouldn’t be as reputed if they hadn’t had the custom of surprising us just when we thought that a certain memory technology has hit its peak, in this case, DDR3. The competition was going around 2200 MHz, when Kingston decided to send us two kits of its newest memory, declared to 2333 and 2400 MHz, respectively.

You’ll agree that these numbers seem impressive, having in mind that certain ordinary CPUs work at as many MHz… As far as latencies are concerned, the same setup has been used for both kits, CL9-11-9-27, with a 1.65 V voltage, which means that there is no danger of roasting the IMC (integrated memory controller) in your new Intel CPU. Both kits will be available in dual-channel and triple-channel variants. We’ve had the opportunity to hang out with dual-channel kits, intended for the P55 platform. The bundle also contains a HyperX fan, mounted above the DIMM slots, so that it could provide additional cooling for these modules. As far as we know, these kits can be bought both with and without this fan. The memory hasn’t heated up too much under load, which means that we didn’t even need to install this fan; CPU cooler was enough to keep the sticks cool as well in ordinary living room conditions (24-25 degrees). Pay attention that his high a memory clock is no easy task for your motherboard and IMC. We were able to pick the motherboard we wanted for testing and opted for Gigabyte’s GA-P55A-UD5, since it provides a 12x RAM multiplier, while certain other models only allowed 10x. The actual RAM clock is gained by multiplying the BCLK with the memory multiplier, which means that for 2400 MHz we need 2400/12=200, i.e. a BCLK of 200 MHz. Models that offer as much as 10x for RAM multiplier make the entire process much more complicated, since the required BCLK is then more than 230 MHz, which is a very complicated task to achieve.

The memory is covered by a cooler identical to that already seen on KHX2133, i.e. a very nice blue piece of aluminium, going upwards to achieve as good heat dissipation as possible, without occupying the neighbouring DIMM slot. Of course, a “chubbier” CPU cooler could cause problems if the DIMM slots aren’t situated far enough from the CPU socket.