Kingston LoVo 1866 Memory Review

Introduction

Power requirements in PCs have grown enormously in the last few years. Whereas once we could survive with 300 Watt power supplies, and if you had a really beefy setup maybe 500 Watts. Now most of us have power supplies either at or near to the 1000 Watt mark in our ever greater need to satisfy our lust for more performance and feed our behemoths that give us the eye-candy we love so much.

However you'd have to live under a rock not to have noticed the global shift in recent years away from hedonism and towards a more conservative approach that is designed to retain what little is left of our planet after the industrial revolution.

To this end manufacturers are starting to introduce components that place a much lower drain upon the energy requirements of your house or office. One such company is Kingston who have been in the memory marketplace for as long as it's existed. Today we're looking at their low-voltage DDR3 kit called, in a moment of inspiration, the LoVo.

Technical Specifications

So what have we in our metaphorically sweaty mitts today? A nip to the Kingston website to download the datasheet finds the following.

JEDEC standard 1.5v
16 128M x 8-bit DDR FBGA per module
Programmable CAS latency of 6,7,8 or 9
Programmable Additive latency of 0, -2 or -1
8 independent internal bank
8-bit pre-fetch
Bi-directional Differential Data Strobe
Asynchronous Reset
667mHz fCK for 1333Mb/sec/pin
XMP 1 : DDR3-1866 CL9-9-9-27-2T @ 1.35v
XMP 2 : DDR3-1600 CL9-9-9-27-2T @ 1.25v

The main thing we're interested in is the XMP profiles. We've tested many kits through here that required 1.65v to reach 1600MHz, so to see 1866 at reasonable timings only using 1.35v is very impressive.