| Kingston HyperX Genesis 16GB DDR3-1600 |  |
| Reviews - Featured Reviews: Memory | ||||||||
| Written by David Ramsey | ||||||||
| Thursday, 29 December 2011 | ||||||||
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Testing & ResultsTesting MethodologyFor comparison against the Kingston HyperX Genesis 1600MHz memory kit, I rounded up several other new quad-channel memory kits. All kits comprised four 4GB DIMMs for a total of 16GB of memory. There was one DDR3-1333 kit, a high-performance Corsair DDR3-1600 memory kit with tighter timings, a (very expensive) Kingston HyperX Genesis DDR3-2133 kit, and the Kingston HyperX 1600MHz kit that's the subject of this review. I ran all the memory kits at their XMP profile speeds on an Intel X79 Express system using an ASUS X79 Sabertooth motherboard and an Intel Core i7 3960X processor running at its stock clock speeds. For this test I used three synthetic benchmarks to measure memory performance, and three application-based benchmarks to assess real-world performance. 
Test System
Test Software
Let's start with the synthetic testing...
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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.