Page 10 - Overclocking and Conclusion
Ever since Intel's second generation Core processors hit the market, it really made a reviewer's job a lot easier. For the lazy bunch of us, overclocking memory used to involve fine tuning of the front side bus or base clock of the processor to precisely measure the maximum attainable RAM speed. Since Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge's base clock is practically locked down, and for practical purposes, capped voltage at 1.65V, the only practical way of testing this is to see if the tested modules can notch up an entire step. With the Kingston HyperX Beast KHX21C11T3K2/16X 2x8GB, it won't step up to 2400MHz, nor did I expect it to. After all, this is high density memory, and they are already extremely fast. On the other hand, giving it an extra 0.05V to 1.65V allowed me to tighten the timings to 10-11-11-30, but I highly doubt that will make any difference in the context of performance in real life.
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When my colleague Kenneth first saw the Kingston HyperX Beast KHX21C11T3K2/16X 2x8GB DDR3 RAM kit, his first reaction, as you can see on the forums, was, "What a beast!" On a completely separate occasion, another friend of mine, who is not a computer enthusiast by a long shot, first saw photos of the Kingston HyperX Beast KHX21C11T3K2/16X 2x8GB, his first comment was, "Wow, that really is a beast!" As you fellow geek and writer of this review, after testing the Kingston HyperX Beast KHX21C11T3K2/16X 2x8GB, my conclusion has to come in agreement with both Kenneth and my non-computer enthusiast friend -- the HyperX Beast really is a beast. What made all three people come to the same conclusion? For Kenneth, it was almost 11pm at night, so it was probably just a funny reaction to the product name. For my non-computer enthusiast friend, it was most likely the look. The aggressive heatsink design has always been a highlight of Kingston HyperX RAM, whether it serves any practical function or not, and the HyperX Beast is no exception. As for me, it has to be the performance. Normally, if you want speed, you lose out on capacity. If you want capacity, you lose out on speed. For the Kingston HyperX Beast, what made it so beastly is you get both performance and capacity that delivers (And even overclocks a bit, wow). At the end of the day, whether you are after the name, the look, or the performance, the Kingston HyperX Beast DDR3-2133 2x8GB is really a beast. For a somewhat beastly price of about $185 at press time, it may require a beastly wallet, the question now is, are you beastly enough to buy it?
Kingston provided this product to APH Networks for the purpose of evaluation.
Since April 30, 2007, Number Ratings have been dropped for all CPUs, motherboards, RAM, SSD/HDDs, and graphics cards. This is to ensure the most appropriate ratings are reflected without the inherent limits of using numbers. Everything else will continue using the Number Rating System.
More information in our Review Focus.
The Kingston HyperX Beast KHX21C11T3K2/16X 2x8GB is a beastly set of RAM. Ingredients include a beastly name, beastly look, and beastly performance; made for people with a beastly wallet and a beastly computer.
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Page Index
1. Introduction, Packaging, Specifications
2. A Closer Look, Installation, Test System
3. Benchmark: AIDA64 CPU
4. Benchmark: AIDA64 FPU
5. Benchmark: AIDA64 Memory
6. Benchmark: PCMark 7
7. Benchmark: 3DMark 11
8. Benchmark: PassMark PerformanceTest 7.0
9. Benchmark: SuperPI 1M, Cinebench R11.5
10. Overclocking and Conclusion
