Kingston HyperX PC3-11000

Josh Collins takes a look at Kingston's entry into the DDR3 market.

DDR3 has arrived, and while it’s only just trickling in, it is definitely here
to stay. The latest company to release sticks that accommodate this standard
is Kingston, specifically its HyperX PC3-11000 modules.

Due to DDR3 being so new, we currently don’t have a standardised system for testing such kits. So we replaced our standard EVGA 680i SLI motherboard with the Gigabyte GA-P35T-DQ6.

To obtain the stock frequency of DDR3 1375 we chose to overclock the FSB to 430MHz, set the X6800’s multiplier to seven, manually set the timings to 7-7-7-20 and implemented a 5:8 memory divider. This resulted in the memory running at DDR3 1376 and the X6800 running an effective core frequency of 3010MHz.

At these speeds Everest’s read, write and latency benchmarks scored 8806MB/s,
7828MB/s and 59.1ns respectively. In the Super Pi 4M calculation the system scored 1min 36.484s and 29.093s for the wPrime 32M calculation. These results demonstrate the massive bandwidth offered from DDR3 over DDR2, even after taking into consideration that the FSB is overclocked to reach the specified speeds.

Already extremely fast, we couldn’t help but overclock the modules. After setting the FSB to 466MHz, lowering the multiplier to six, manually setting timings to 7-7-7-20 and enforcing the 5:8 divider we netted ourselves a healthy memory frequency of DDR3 1491, however with a lower CPU frequency of 2796MHz.

These new settings scored 9368MBs, 7413MB/s and 56.1ns in the Everest memory read, write and latency benchmarks respectively. Following on from here, we ran the Super Pi 4M calculation which returned a score of 1min 40.344s and wPrime 32M calculation which returned a 31.328s score. Here we can notice an increase in the bandwidth-related benchmarks and a decrease in the more CPU-intensive benchmarks due to the 214MHz slower CPU frequency.

The Kingston HyperX PC3-11000 memory kit shows a solid future for the performance of DDR3 and should leave any Atomican drooling at the mouth for more.