ocaholic - Memory > DDR3 > Patriot Viper 3 Black Mamba 2x4GB DDR3-2400 CL10 1.65V Review

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Closer Look

Sold in a plastic tray put inside a cardboard box, the memory is protected well enough to survive any handling on the way to a potential customer.

The matte black heatspreaders would be a welcome sight in a build of almost any theme but, unfortunately, the standard green PCB lets things down on the styling front.

Keeping things simple, Patriot have gone for the standard affair of sheet aluminium plates held on the modules via a strap of thermal tape to be kept responsible for cooling. While this is not the most efficient option possible, it should definitely keep the price low since it used on all other submodifications of Viper 3 as well.

With modules being 4 GB and single-sided, we expected to see commonly-used Samsung 4Gbit revision B but what we actually found under the heatspreaders is Hynix 4Gbit MFR.

The SPD on Patriot 2400C10 features basic information on the maker and the model of the memory. It is also flashed with seven JEDEC profiles and an XMP 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	Patriot Viper 3 Black Mamba PV38G240C0K
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 an 8 GB kit, we use eight 750 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

When it comes to overclocking DDR3 memory, the relation between stable voltage, frequency and timings can usually be described in the following way: higher voltage allows running potentially lower CAS latency while lowest stable values of the three other primary timings remain primarily frequency-dependant.
That said, let us have a look at the numbers our Viper could achieve. At first glance, the 20-30MHz headroom above spec at rated timings and voltage does not look too impressive. However, by using higher latencies and/or more voltage we were easily able to crack DDR3-2600 at 10-13-12 and DDR3-2800 using 11-14-13, which are the sort of numbers you normally see by a memory located in a completely different price league.
While 1466MHz was as high as either of our platforms could remain fully stable at, it is not where raw frequency actually stopped. Joined by some voltage on a hot Saturday evening, we were able to pull off SuperPi 32M runs at DDR3-2933 CL10, DDR3-3200 CL11 and DDR3-3300 CL12 maxing out at DDR3-3500, all using regular aircooling.

Page 4 - Results

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Conclusion

Looking up the EU prices for 8 GB kits of Viper 3 series via geizhals, we see that both Black Mamba and Venom Red can be had starting from 75 Euros + shipping. Strictly speaking, this is not the best price offer for DDR3-2400 CL10 rated memory out there but if Patriot are able to remain consistent with use of Hynix chips then the Vipers should definitely be taken seriously by anyone browsing the surrounding memory market.
What we have in the end is another strong upper midrange product. There is nothing seriously wrong with the DDR3-2400 version of Viper 3; the only thing we managed to come up with a valid complaint about is the PCB color. Moreover, Patriot’s unorthodox selection of memory chips provided lots of positive emotions during the overclocking part of our testing, which is exactly the thing we are seeking for being an overclockaholic website.

Award

As a result, the 2x4 GB Patriot Viper 3 DDR3-2400 CL10 memory deservedly gets our maximum rating of 5 stars out of possible 5.