Review: Even with a large heatsink, a Dodge would be cooler that Patriot's Viper kit. And probably easier to type.
In the wild, one can spot a male Patriot Viper DIMM by the distinct rectangular barbs running the length of its spine. It is believed these are used to cool the beast, whilst fending off predators such as CPU heatsinks that watch over it, waiting for a chance to fit.
*ahem*
Aiming to maintain a consistent clock rate of 3.5GHz during testing, we set upon prodding the glossy black and blue sticks. Their stock performance was respectable, with a result of 20244 MB/s/16601 MB/s in Everest read/write.
Going the low latency route, we achieved an impressive 6-8-6-18-T1 at 1660MHz. Unfortunately, this didn’t translate in benchmarks – common with DDR3 memory. Both read and write speeds dropped considerably, the latency rose, and our synthetic benchmarks spat out uninspiring results.
Attempting to raise the clock rate instead, the PC refused to play nice above the rated 2000MHz, regardless of how loose the timings were set. In an attempt to squeeze as much performance as possible, the latency was dropped to 8-9-8-21-T1 which gave us our best result of 20574 MB/s/16600 MB/s read/write. PiFast and wPrime took to this well, with marginal yet measurable gains.
During all this, the temperatures of the sticks remained tepid, thanks to those distinct aluminium barbs.
These sticks do perform well, despite their limited overclocking headroom. At a cost of $275 for the trio, however, we’re inclined to lean toward a cheaper set of Ripjaws.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012