Kingston H20 6GB 2000MHz DDR3 Review
Conclusion
This has been one of the most disappointing, depressing reviews of recent times.
Kingston have been hitting everything out of the park in recent times. They’ve come up trumps again and again from the LoVolt kits to the truly brilliant HyperX T1.
When we were asked if we wanted to test a water-cooled HyperX kit you can imagine we were foaming at the mouth in anticipation of what Kingston could bring to the table. A full on 2000MHz kit, with a pre-installed waterblock and bearing the near legendary HyperX name. How could it possibly go wrong?
Well like great comedy and market-changing inventions, it’s all about timing. Or in this case, lack of timings. There have been many CAS8 2000MHz kits around, and 8-8-8-24 1T @ 1.65v is pretty much expected. So when we found that the Kingston HyperX H20 was set to 9-10-9-27 2T you can imagine our disappointment.
That of course was once we’d managed to get the system running because for reasons best known to the RAM gurus at the Kingston R&D, the QPI was set to a boggling 1.7v. So high our Core i7-950 on the ASUS Rampage III Extreme wouldn’t even POST. Even the first i7 920 C-stepping chips didn’t require such enormous QPI voltage. It certainly doesn’t leave any room for overclocking.
The water-cooled heat-sink itself, although well-designed, is nearly secondary. Even running flat out through our multitude of tests the Kingston HyperX H20 never rose about 41°C. If you do want to put it in your loop anyway you’ll need more than a bit of tubing and a cable tie as clearly nobody who tested the design had a modern graphics card in at the time. Sure you could run with a tiny HTPC card in, or even an onboard solution, but that would be missing the point considerably.
So it doesn’t overclock. It’s out-classed at stock settings. Those self-same stock settings are so high that a lot of kits will stop the PC from booting. It’s water-cooled but that is neither necessary or well designed. This isn’t so much shooting yourself in the foot, as shooting yourself in the kneecaps with a shotgun.
What we really can’t understand though is why this is so bad in the first place. It’s not like Kingston is new to the market, they invented DIMMs after all. Neither are they incapable of producing class leading memory as the HyperX T1 is fiercely quick and brilliant in equal measure. It’s not strictly a timings issue either as that self-same HyperX T1 gives better performance at 9-11-9 rather than the 9-10-9 we see here.
All in all this is a blot on an otherwise wonderful record Kingston have. If you’re in the market for water-cooled RAM then we’d recommend steering clear and buying an ordinary HyperX kit and a better designed water-block. If you just want RAM, you’re not really short of choices.
Thanks to Kingston for sending the HyperX H20 for review. Discuss in our forums.
