| Kingston HyperX Genesis 16GB DDR3-1600 |  |
| Reviews - Featured Reviews: Memory | ||||||||
| Written by David Ramsey | ||||||||
| Thursday, 29 December 2011 | ||||||||
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Closer Look: Kingston HyperX GenesisThe Kingston KHX1600C9D3K4/16GX memory kit is delivered in a plastic tray with slots that hold the modules upright. I prefer this to the more standard practice of enclosing each module in an individual plastic shell. The Kingston tray has slots for 10 DIMMs and can be used to store memory you're not using.
The individual modules use blue-anodized low-profile aluminum heat spreaders. Kingston specs these at 30mm high, but I measure just under 32mm as shown below. I recommend low-profile memory for X79 Express systems since many CPU air coolers will extend over one or both sets of DIMM sockets.
Most of the information on the label is probably internal Kingston parts numbers and the like, but the DDR3 speed (XMP profile, anyway) and memory kit size can be determined from the "KHX" part number. The 1.65V voltage shown is for the XMP profile. If for some reason you want to run this memory at 1333Mhz, it'll work fine at 1.50V.
Overall, Kingston's blue anodized heat spreaders with bright accents make for an attractive package. Of course, they won't be very visible installed in your system; even a windowed case will only show the uninteresting tops of the memory modules.
Although the SPD timings on these modules are for 1333MHz, anyone buying this memory would immediately set the XMP profile of DDR3-1600 at 9-9-9-27. These timings are fairly loose but help keep the cost of the kit low...and, as we'll see, don't hamper real-world performance. Join me as I explain my test methodology in the next section.
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Comments
If it cannot be OC'd then the memory is of very low quality, thus, that is how I will think of Kingston Memory from now on. Not overclockable according to Benchmark Reviews.com.
Memory overclockability was more important back in the days when raising the FSB was the only way to overclock the CPU. These days, Intel processors either have unlocked multipliers or locked-down BCLKs (like Sandy Bridge) and almost all AMD processors allow multiplier overclocking. Granted, X79 does bring back a limited BCLK adjustability, but again, it's just not going to make any real difference. Granted, some people just like to see how high their memory benchmark scores can be...
I also disagree that "if it cannot be OC'd then the memory is of very low quality." Overclocking is never guaranteed and is dependent on the motherboard as well as the memory; just because I could take (for example) this memory to 1800MHz at 9-8-9-22 is no guarantee at all that you could. High quality memory runs at its specs (XMP if so equipped) reliably; there's really no other criterion that makes sense.
If you're interested in real world performance improvements (as opposed to benchmark scores), concentrate on overclocking your CPU and video card.
Note, though, that they were using Corsair Dominator memory, which will typically have more overclocking headroom than this stuff.