Patriot Viper DDR3-1800 C8

Memory not just for people in the US of A.

The rather strange name of this memory conjures up thoughts of fast-striking snakes, hell-bent on pumping you with deadly poison. These modules do this, but instead of fast-striking, they are just bloody fast (and pump deadly data instead).

Patriot is an American-based company, specialising in everything from flash drives to extreme DDR3 kits. It’s been around since 1985, so is quite good at its job. While the name alludes to this, the company has also started to move into the Aussie market, so we grabbed a kit and whacked them into a mobo for some tests.

The modules worked at the stock settings after a short play around with the BIOS settings (as the mobo didn’t detect the correct ones, defaulting to 1066MHz instead), and are very fast – with a significant amount of latency hurting the Super Pi result, however. Bringing the speed and latencies down yielded a pleasant surprise in the form of greatly enhanced read and latency speeds, but you will have to increase the voltage to get it stable.

The Viper sticks are covered on both sides by a ‘picket fence’ style heatsink, with an embossed brushed steel patriot logo on one side. These are probably shaped more for form than function, but do a good job of keeping the modules cool and stable. We did notice a manufacturing flaw on the top of one of the heatsinks, where the silver colouring had chipped off and exposed the copper underneath, which might look a bit strange for those who have windowed cases.
With warranty good enough for a lifetime (provided you stay within the stock voltage of 1.9V) and great performance, these are some nice modules that will perform very well and look the part too.