Kingston HyperX DDR3 CL9 2000mhz 3GB Triple channel kit

Test Setup

For todays testing we will be using the Asus P6T Deluxe, a mid range i7 motherboard from Asus that we hope to use for all of our memory testing.

Here’s a breakdown of the rest of the components:
 
Processor
Intel Core i7 920 ‘Nehalem’ @ 2.66Ghz

Motherboard
Asus P6T Deluxe

Memory
Kingston Technology HyperX DDR3 CL9 2000MHz 9-9-9-27 3x1GB Kit
Corsair CL8 1600MHz 8-8-8-24 3x2GB kit

Graphics Card
Nvidia 280GTX

Drivers
GeForce 180.60

PSU
Gigabyte Odin 1200w

Operating System
Windows Vista Ultimate 64bit SP1 + Updates

 
For testing the memory we used a number of synthetic benchmarks and games:
 
Synthetic Benchmarks
  • Lavalys Everest 4.10
  • SuperPI mod_1.5
  • Sisoft Sandra 2009
3D Benchmarks
  • 3DMark Vantage
  • Far Cry 2
 
For the run of benchmarks, we will be comparing the 2000MHz HyperX kit to the 1600MHz 6GB Corsair Dominator kit which costs around the same price to see if there is any real benefit in sacrificing timings and size for bandwidth.

 

Overclocking
 
Starting from scratch we disabled on the settings that may affect the overclocked settings such as Intel Speed Step as well as disabling the C-State settings which may also affect some of the results in the benchmark testing phase of the review. Here’s how the sticks look at stock speed:
 
cpu memory

JEDEC
 

Now we see the missing tRAS setting. At its rated speed its JEDEC setting is 27 but as we see above we did manage to lower this ever so slightly to 24 which is a little more respectable.

Overclocking the ram was a painstaking affair. No matter what settings I used I couldn’t obtain any more performance from the kit. On the surface this was disappointing but when you consider that Kingston have achieved the ‘golden’ 2000MHz setting with just 1.65v it’s not at all bad. The kit was clearly already at it’s limit so I wasn’t going to force the issue to much even though I did nudge the voltage up to 1.7v as well as lowering the settings to no avail.

Let’s see how the memory performs with our suite of memory benchmarks…