ocaholic - Memory > DDR3 > Kingston HyperX Beast 2x8GB DDR3-2400 CL11 1.65V Review

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Closer Look

Similar to specifications, the packaging also remains unchanged; it is a typical Kingston-esque combination of plastic tray and transparent cover.

Looking at the messy module design, it seems that Kingston were trying something new just for the sake of trying something new. With these looks and the mix of green and black, one has to have a very specific build theme for the Beast to blend in, or simply not care about the looks at all.
Rumor has it; there is a version with black PCB in the pipeline. However, our own insider claims that it’s not very likely to be produced in large numbers as, at Kingston, binning takes place after module assembly and there is simply no demand for black-PCB rejects in Kingston’s main OEM customer circles.

Judging on the performance component of the heatspreaders, it seems that things went a tad downhill for Kingston as stuff stuck on the Beast has nowhere near the mass nor the surface area of ones used on the T1 series not too long ago. Certainly, this allows to cut production costs and with Kingston being a value-oriented manufacturer, we can’t see much too irrational in this decision.

With both sides of modules populated, a simple procedure of popping off the heatspreaders reveals that our sample of 2400C11 is based on a modification of Hynix 4Gbit memory ICs commonly referred to as MFR. Having recently seen the same stuff being used on much slower versions of Beast and yet still fail to achieve specifications, we hope that Kingston put more effort into binning the ICs for their flagship 8Gb/module model.

SPD chip on the 2400C11 version of Kingston’s Beast features information on the model and manufacturing date of the modules. It is also flashed with four JEDEC and two XMP profiles (DDR3-2400 with specs and DDR3-2133 as a backup) that are meant to make life easier when it comes to making memory work out of the box.

Page 2 - Closer Look

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Photo Gallery

Page 3 - Photo Gallery

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Testing Method & Test Setup

To test the overclocking capabilities of the memory we are going to use Intel’s recently released Haswell platform. As memory overclocks are known to vary between different motherboards, we are going to perform the tests using two different platforms to be sure that our numbers are reliable.

Motherboard	ASUS Maximus VI Gene (BIOS 0607) Gigabyte Z87X-OC (BIOS F5q)
CPU	Intel Core i7-4770K ES @ 4.0 GHz
Graphic card	ASUS GTX 580
Memory	Kingston HyperX Beast KHX24C11T3K2/16X
SSD	Samsung PM840 Pro
PSU	Seasonic Platinum 660 Watts
OS	Windows 7, 64 bit SP1

Even though Haswell is very flexible on the memory frequency one can set, very few people actually do base clock (BCLK) overclocking on their daily setups. Therefore, instead of our previous procedure of fixing the voltage and raising the frequency in 10MHz steps we are now going to fix the frequency and minimize the voltage in 0.01V steps.
As usual, our stability method of choice is HCI Memtest. Since we are dealing with a 16 GB kit, we use eight 1500 MB instances and call things stable if we see all of them to go past 100% without showing a single error.
Not to get things too complicated, we only set the primary timings, command rate (1T) and the memory voltage by hand while the rest of the settings is left for the motherboard and SPD to agree on.

Results

As usual, we test to see how memory reacts to voltage changes and in case with Hynix MFR this reaction translates in ability to run higher frequencies without having to raise the CAS latency.
Despite the memory being able to lower the timings to predicted 10-12-11 at rated frequency and run as DDR3-2600, we are not too happy with the results for two reasons. Firstly, the numbers above took a hefty voltage increase to achieve and, secondly, during our testing we experienced something which felt like a compatibility issue between the memory and the ASUS board at frequencies north of 1100MHz effectively making specs impossible to achieve. After following all the suggestions proposed by Kingston’s R&D department, we still couldn’t get the memory to run meaning that we had to complete the 1200MHz+ part of the testing using a Gigabyte board.

Page 4 - Results

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Conclusion

Using geizhals as a price research tool, we see that prices for the 2x8 GB version of 2400C11 Beast currently start at 125 Euros exluding shipping across the EU. Although this makes Kingston’s offer second cheapest in the 16 GB DDR3-2400 category, there are quite a few competitor products boasting 10-12-12 timings as standard in less than 10 Euro proximity. Given that Kingston are no longer able to offer their trademark bulletproof compatibity and reliability, the things are not looking too good for the Beast.
All things considered, the 2400C11 version of the Beast did not manage to impress us in any way. Having dreary specs, messy appearance, lackluster OC potential, questionable pricing with compability issues sitting on top of things, Kingston are hardly setting an example for other makers to follow.

Award

Since there is also nothing really wrong with it, the 2x8 GB version of DDR3-2400 CL11 beast gets a mediocre rating of 3 stars out of 5.