Kingston HyperX DDR3 3GB 2GHz Triple-Channel Memory Kit Review

By Nathan Kirsch November 20, 2008

RST Pro 3 Testing and The Test System

RAM Stress Test Professional 3 PCI Express is a memory testing hardware/ firmware designed for the rigorous testing needs of memory and system manufactures, design engineers, and service professionals. R.S.T. Pro3 is a Self-Booting, Operating System Independent memory diagnostic card for exercising and validating RAM in Intel Core2/Xeon and AMD Athlon/Opteron compatible processors. I use one here at Legit Reviews as I have found it the best way to find faulty memory modules and one of the best ways to see if an overclock is really stable or not.

RST Pro 3 Testing

I placed the RAM Stress Test Pro 3 PCI Express into the test system and let it test the memory at 2000MHz with 9-9-9-24 1T timings and 1.650V to see if it would detect any errors. The green PCB above the pair of Radeon HD 4870 X2 graphics cards is the memory tester for those that aren’t sure what they are looking at. Just over an hour later, the test results came back showing that this 2GB memory kit was rock solid with no errors! This is very impressive for a memory kit that is running 2000MHz!

The Test System:

All testing was done on a fresh install of Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit with Service Pack 1 installed. All benchmarks were completed on the desktop with no other software programs running. All of the modules were run in triple-channel mode. The pair of Radeon HD 4870 X2 video cards were run in CrossFireX mode with 8.11 CATALYST drivers and the ASUS P6T Deluxe motherboard was run using BIOS 0901. The day before this article was posted, ASUS released BIOS 0904 and we checked out numbers with that one, but they remained the same. We checked with ASUS and the ASUS P6T Deluxe BIOS 0904 contained some updates for PCI-E to receive signal training. The QPI on the processor was increased to 153MHz in order to run the memory at 2000MHz.

Memory Kits Tested:

The two memory kits that will be compared today are both triple-channel kits that contain three 1GB memory modules. The 3GB Kingston HyperX 2GHz kit will be compared to the 3GB Qimonda PC3-8500 memory kit running at 1066MHz. The reason for this gap in frequency is to compare performance memory to mainstream memory in order to see if the performance gains are significant.