Whenever we say Kingston the main thing that flashes in our mind is its name in the memory market.Started in 1987 this company started with one single product and gradually branched into anything and everything that uses memory,be it high performances USB drives or server memory or SSD’s.As for me Kingston hold a special value in my life as my first machine(a humble Celeron D with Asrock board) has 2X512MB of Kingston DDR memory.
Now,keeping nostalgia aside,lets see what we on the test bench today.
Presenting Kingston Hyper X Blu 1600Mhz 8GB kit (P/N:KHX1600C9D3B1K2/8GX ).
The kit is stated as “Extreme Gaming Memory for Overclocking and Gaming Enthusiasts”,lets see how extreme it is..shall we?
First up a screenshot of the SPD at stock.
As we can see the kit is XMP ready.So with an Intel system setting up wont be a problem.
Please continue to next page for more.
Let spice up the review with some pics of the kit and the ram itself..shall we?
Here’s a pic of the kit with plastic box.
With the simple themed design this kit would look good on any system.
One more closeup to wrap it up before we move on to testing and overclocking
Recently lots of people was asking me about the test system i use so though i would give a brief overview on the system i use in here for testing out.
| CPU | Intel Core i5 2500K |
|---|---|
| Motherboard | Asus P8Z68 Deluxe |
| Ram | Kingston 1600Mhz 8GB DDr3 |
| Storage | Western Digital 320GB HDD (WD320AAKX) |
| Video Card | Sapphire Radeon HD 7850 |
| Cooling | Noctua NH D14 with GT 1850 fans |
| Case | Ghetto made bench table |
| Power supply Unit | Corsair AX 1200W |
System Settings
Lets see what the kit is capable of at stick..then we will move on to overclocking.
The other kits were included only to compare stock performance.
First up let me tell the benchmarks am going to run to show the capabilities of this kit.
- Super Pi 1.5
- Wprime 1.55
- Aida 64 Memory Benchmark suite
All the runs were made in a freshly installed windows Seven Ultimate SP1 Installation with reboots in between every benchmark.An average of three runs were taken into consideration to rule out margin of error as much as possible.
Super PI 1.5
(lower times are better)
Super PI is a computer program that calculates pi to a specified number of digits after the decimal point – up to a maximum of 32 million. It uses Gauss-Legendre algorithm and is a Windows port of the program used by Yasumasa Kanada in 1995 to compute Pi to 32Million digits
Super PI is extremely sensitive to ram timings,specifically the 32M computation.We can see the Kingston kit is beating its counterpart easily.
Wprime 1.55
(lower times are better)
wPrime uses a recursive call of Newton’s method for estimating functions, with f(x)=x2-k, where k is the number we’re sqrting, until Sgn(f(x)/f'(x)) does not equal that of the previous iteration, starting with an estimation of k/2. It then uses an iterative calling of the estimation method a set amount of times to increase the accuracy of the results. It then confirms that n(k)2=k to ensure the calculation was correct. It repeats this for all numbers from 1 to the requested maximum.
Aida 64 memory Benchmark
(higher is better in case of Memory bandwidth,lower is better in case of latency)
AIDA64 Extreme Edition is a streamlined Windows diagnostic and benchmarking software for home users.
Memory bandwidth benchmarks (Memory Read, Memory Write, Memory Copy) measure the maximum achiveable memory data transfer bandwidth. The code behind these benchmark methods are written in Assembly and they are extremely optimized for every popular AMD and Intel processor core variants by utilizing the appropriate x86, MMX, 3DNow!, SSE, SSE2 or SSE4.1 instruction set extension.
The Memory Latency benchmark measures the typical delay when the CPU reads data from system memory. Memory latency time means the penalty measured from the issuing of the read command until the data arrives to the integer registers of the CPU.
So on stock the kit performs nicely.lets move on to overclocking.
For the overclocking part my methodology was like this:
- Boot using the memory multi given on the board if it boots at all.
- Run Aida 64 Suite for stability along with 15 minutes LinX
- Take validation
Now the P8Z68 deluxe has memory support up to 2400Mhz so clocking ram is no problem provided the IMC of the processor is good.
Lets see how far they have gone.
First up the 1600Mhz frontier:
tried a little tightening on the latency,couldn’t boot below Cl 8-9-8-24 1.5V
So my adventure stopped there..sadly.
Now the next stop was 1866 Mhz.
Memory Multi..check.
Vdimm to 1.65V..check..and there she boots..
So the some must say the ram boots at 1866..big deal…but there’s more..
Vdimm 1.65V..check…
timings..a little loose..check
So there you have it…a puny little “good-looking” ram clocked at 1600C9 doing 2133 C11 at stock volts.
Good job Kingston..mind telling me the magic you used under there?
So..there goes my OC adventures..here’s a few graphs about the performance scaling on difference speed.
Super Pi 1.5
(lower=better)
Wprime 1.55
(lower=better)
Don’t worry about the scores too much..
Now the Aida 64 Memory Benchmarks
Aida memory Bandwidth
Aida Memory latency
SO there you have it..
a nice little kit that can kick some serious butt.
Well…when i had this kit in my hand..i said “thou shall not pass my torture test”.
But at the end of the day the kit won and is laughing at my face for underestimating it.
This little kit clocked at 1600C9 can do wonders as we have already seen and as far as my sources go it can even do 2400Mhz on better IMC’s.
Am not going into Pro’s and Con’s in this review.Since its hard to find any flaws in this kit.
we have nice packaging,nice performance out of the box,even a considerable overclocking headroom all in one simple kit costing around 3.4k approx(street price would vary).
So from my side…
4.5/5 stars
This kit is a must for anyone who is even remotely thinking about overclocking.
Many thanks to Kingston India for providing me with the review sample.
Signing out
Sumon Pathak