ocaholic - Memory > DDR3 > Kingston HyperX Beast 4x8GB DDR3-1600 CL9 1.5V Review

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Closer Look

Having ordered the memory, what we found a couple of days later on our table is a carton, which got us excited about the accessories it could possibly contain. But as it turned out a minute later, the box is just a way for Kingston to ship two of their standard plastic two-module trays at the same time.

Matte black is never a bad thing to see as it should easily fit with most of custom themed builds out there. However, the general appearance is slightly spoiled by the standard color of the PCB, which Kingston promise to have replaced by a black one in the newer versions.

What comes down to the heatspreaders used on the Beast, Kingston have made a step down from the mass and the surface ares of ones used on the T1 series and have joined the bandwagon of stamped aluminium jobs. On a positive note, lower height of the Beast improves compatibility with large CPU heatsinks both in terms of ease of mounting and in terms of perpendicular airflow.

Unexpectedly, our sample of 1600C9 Beast is based on Hynix’s 4Gbit memory ICs commonly referred to as MFR. Albeit MFR is currently dominating the overclocking ranks when it comes to chips of ultra high density, our previous experience with 1866C10 has taught us to treat such surprises with a bit of skepticism. What we most likely have in front of us are four modules that have failed higher bins, but whether this actually implies some overclocking cripplage, we will find out a couple of pages later.

The SPD chip on the modules features some basic information about manufacturer, model and production date of the modules. It also containes four JEDEC profiles and an XMP meant to make the platform set the right timings without any additional input from the user.

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 KHX16C9T3K4/32X
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 it is possible can set, very few people actually do base clock (BCLK) overclocking with 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 32 GB kit, we use eight 2000 MB instances and call things stable if we see all of them to go past 150% 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 are 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.
For what is most likely a binning reject, we find the results our 1600C9 kit could achieve very impressive. Not only do these have an easy 150MHz headroom above spec, but ability to run DDR3-2200 with 9-11-10-30 or DDR3-2400 with 10-12-11-30 also allows this kit to compete in higher leagues.

Page 4 - Results

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Conclusion

Looking up the price for 32 GB kits of 1600C9 Beast via geizhals, we see that offers currently start at 241 Euros across the EU which is out of the rational range for memory with such low specs. Given the money that gets you 4x8 GB of 1600C9 Beast, it is possible to select from multiple DDR3-2133 rated models of similar capacity or even buy a 2400C10 quad kit courtesy of Team Group.
Despite being disguised as a mid-range product, the 32 GB version of 1600C9 Beast can pack a big punch when it comes to overclocking. However, the overclocking features af the modules are not guaranteed by the specification and therefore can change at any time without prior notice. Looking at what one actually gets in the worst-case scenario, the 1600C9 Beast offer nothing that justifies that price tag and on this ground, these cannot deserve our recommendation.

Award

Consequently, the 4x8 GB version of Kingston HyperX Beast DDR3-1600 CL9 receives a rating of 3.5 stars out of 5.