Published: December 3, 2010 | Source: G.Skill | Author: Bryan Waters

G.Skill Trident DDR3-2500 4GB Review

Conclusion

Many companies seem to produce endless steams of minutely different RAM in a variety of barely variable heat-sinks or packages. G.Skill on the other hand don’t often produce a new kit, but when they do it’s usually something worth taking notice of.

Such is the case with the G.Skill Trident kit on test today.

Blazing speed barely covers it. It’s fearsomely quick for a dual-channel kit, and the XMP is such that it really works ‘out of the box’.

In fact it’s so good at stock that if you’re after the fastest plug-and-play dual-channel kit on the market then you really shouldn’t need to look no further. The heat-sink is gorgeous, it doesn’t require any tweaking at all and even if you run it in passive mode it doesn’t get hot, although the cooler is provided and works very well should you be nervous.

Unfortunately it’s not quite that cut and dried.

For a start the XMP requires a motherboard capable of doing over 200MHz BCLK. Most should be able to do this easily but even our Gigabyte P55A-UD4 is heading towards its limit at the required 208MHz. This means if you’re after a kit that overclocks well then you either need a motherboard capable of extreme Bus Speeds, or look elsewhere.

We did manage to get the timings down a little bit whilst still retaining most of the speed, but to go any tighter on the timings you’d have to go even slower on the RAM. Dropping to around the 2000MHz mark on the RAM merely to obtain CAS7 would be missing the point of the G.Skill Trident, and also not gaining any of the benefits of having such super-fast RAM.

G.Skill almost in danger of having a product that performs too highly if only because it will push your system to the limits. However for so long we’ve been saying that companies are far too cautious with their hardware and we regularly prove that there is tons of overclocking headroom. So we’d be fairly hypocritical if we complained that there isn’t a lot of headroom available in the G.Skill Trident for “free” performance, but rather they’ve hit the bump-stops straight out the gate.

Pricing is currently unavailable although looking at other similarly spec’d kits we’d expect the G.Skill to come in around the Â£140-Â£150 mark considering it comes with the G.Skill cooler as well.

Assuming that you haven’t got a very poor quality motherboard, the G.Skill Trident is a fantastic performing kit truly gives phenomenal high-speeds with no tweaking whatsoever.

Â Â