It’s DDR3, but at 1.35V - an odd set of RAM, but is it too expensive to be considered for your next upgrade?
Kingston is one of the more popular memory manufacturers out there, and they've been making memory long before memory was a huge consumer market. In fact, most memory companies started out making chips for servers and manufacturers of computers that couldn't be upgraded; but it's taken a recent boost in build-it-yourself interest to give us the relatively large retail market we see today.
Kingston make a series of memory kits called HyperX, the company's premium overclocking sticks, but the kit we were sent had another addition to the name - LoVo. It's a weird way of showing that this kit is a low voltage DDR3 kit (and surely LV could've done the job just as well), and both sticks run at a much-lower voltage of 1.35V. Whether this realistically does much for the overall power consumption or heat is still quite vague, as the sticks don't come with large heatsinks to mitigate the difference, but it does give them a little more voltage headroom.
Performance with a Core i3 540 chip, one of the platforms this kit is targeted at, is not too bad, giving some nice read bandwidth and a slightly elevated write too. At the XMP settings of 1600MHz with 9-9-9-24 timings, achieved with a QPI speed of 160MHz, the latency was actually noticeably improved compared to G.Skill's Ripjaws at 1333MHz and 7-7-7-21 timings. However, overclocking wasn't particularly amazing, and the price of this kit means that it's not a phenomenal choice - but if you want to (theoretically) save power, this is the kit of choice.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012