Kingston HyperX DDR3 CL9 2000mhz 3GB Triple channel kit

Conclusion

When I was first passed the Kingston HyperX kit to review, I was eager to see if the kit could indeed achieve 2000MHz  Previous Intel chipsets struggled to hit anything above 1800MHz and sometimes they couldn’t even surpass the 1600mhz mark so the dizzy heights of 2000MHz were exclusively for Nvidia chipsets. This has now changed with the advent of the X58 chipset. The HyperX can ‘just’ hit 2000MHz but struggles to go any further, testament to the extreme levels Kingston have programmed this kit.

Personally I would have liked to see 2000MHz in a 6GB kit as I felt that 3GB is ‘not enough’ after being spoilt with 6GB.  Vista just felt snappier with 6GB, Photoshop also appeared to adjust images quicker but that could just be the placebo effect of having so much capacity. However, as the benchmarks showed, 6GB kits come second place to extreme bandwidth when it comes down to the numbers game. I will concede that the CPU speed would have had a small bearing on the scores but as there were no dividers near to the maximum ‘stock’ speed of the HyperX, this was unavoidable.

The price for such performance is costly though with an rrp of £249.99 (but available for £214.99 @ Play.com) . For that you could double the capacity and have better timings at the sacrifice of bandwidth. Whether you actually ‘need’ 6GB will be investigated in a future review but on this showing if performance means everything and you don’t mind paying the price for it,  the HyperX comes highly recommended.

The Good
– Scorching stock performance
– Samsung IC’s

The Mediocre
– Unimaginative Green PCB
– No Overclocking headroom
– Little timing information on the package

The Bad
– Price

Thanks to Kingston for supply the memory kit for todays review. Please discuss in our Forum.