Page 2 - A Closer Look, Test System
The Patriot Viper 4 PC4-22400 2x8GB, being a part of the newest flagship performance DDR4 line from the company, utilizes a set of medium profile heatspreaders. It is designed to draw attention with its red and black color scheme, and styled with a more traditional, mid to late 2000's stance. Aluminum is lightweight, and serves as a decent heat conductor, while the toothed heatsink design improves air ventilation for faster heat dissipation (Although it is probably more for style in this particular application). The teeth are made out of relatively thick aluminum, so it should not bend easily under normal circumstances. The Viper 4 is only about one centimeter taller than modules with no heatspreaders at all. This is useful for systems equipped with side mounted CPU heatsink fans adjacent to the memory slots, as it can piggy-back off the generated airflow. Since the heatspreaders height is relatively moderate, it is still entirely possible for the Viper 4 to fit under a well-designed cooler with sufficient clearance room. In the rare case it does not, you can easily take off the strip at the top by removing two screws. Whether you like to call it marketing gimmick or whatnot, it is almost impossible nowadays to find performance memory without any form of a heatspreader attached, haha. They do undeniably serve a purpose in dissipating heat, but for most memory modules, unless run at a voltage significantly over designed voltages -- which you will not, special thanks to integrated memory controllers on Intel processors -- this feature is certainly not a requirement. But I will admit they look pretty cool in any windowed chassis.
The heatspreader design of the Patriot Viper 4 modules is symmetrical when looked at straight on and also symmetrical between sides, which is fairly logical, because memory ICs reside on both sides of the slick black PCB. Besides functional purposes, it also improves the look. The Viper branding is printed boldly onto the center of each module behind a clear plastic cover. Interestingly, Patriot's logo is not permanently etched anywhere else. A specification label is found on the other side. It lists the model number (PV416G280C6K), frequency, latencies, and the kit's memory capacity. The Patriot Viper 4 PC4-22400 2x8GB's voltage and manufacturing location is not listed.
As you can see more clearly in our photo above, the Patriot Viper 4 PC4-22400 2x8GB has a very nice black PCB. Meanwhile, its heatspreader is composed of three separate metal components. As I have mentioned earlier, you can remove the aluminum strip of teeth at the top by removing two screws for additional clearance room. The heatspreaders are held to the module itself by a strip of thermally conductive adhesive, and are not physically locked together. The adhesive force between the two heatspreaders and memory ICs is pretty strong as always from the company, so if you ever do take them off, keep your hair dryer around.
From our above photo, it should also be clearer on how the heatspreaders are designed. After removing the strip at the top, the heatspreaders are bent along the edge at the top, with a physically symmetrical design. Since the pieces are made from thin aluminum -- but thicker than most heatspreaders I have seen, so it feels solid in the hand -- it does not hold a lot of heat, therefore dissipating the heat energy relatively quickly into the surrounding environment. In the end, if you are going to be pushing your system to the limits with high memory voltages, the heatspreaders may be beneficial to improve system stability and overclocking potential (But you probably will not, thanks to Intel as aforementioned). On the other hand, in the extremely unlikely case you need to remove them if it does not clear your processor heatsink, the fact that the RAM will function just fine without the heatspreaders is something to keep in mind.
A closer look at the memory chips on the Patriot Viper 4 PC4-22400 2x8GB dual channel memory kit. The photo above is not quite clear, but it says "K4A4G085WD" on each IC. These are Samsung manufactured chips, with eight 512MB chips on each side for a total of 8GB on each DIMM. They are identical to the ones found in the G.Skill Trident Z F4-3200C16D-16GTZ 2x8GB I reviewed last week. As mentioned on the previous page, these RAM modules run at a frequency of DDR4-2800 with 16-18-18-36 latencies. They operate at a stock voltage of 1.20V, which is below the Core i3/i5/i7 maximum safe limit of 1.35V. Here is a table of specifications for the ICs, as obtained from Samsung's website:
Production Status: Mass Production
Density: 4Gb
Organization: 512Mx8
Speed: PB, RC
Power: C
Package: 78FBGA
Application: Smart TV, Digital Still/Video Cameras, Set Top Box, Gaming Console
Our test configuration as follows:
CPU: Intel Core i5-6600K
CPU Cooling: Noctua NH-U14S (Dual fan)
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z170X-UD5
Graphics: Gigabyte G1 Gaming GeForce GTX 960 4GB
Chassis: Danger Den Torture Rack
Storage: Kingston HyperX Predator PCIe 480GB
Power: FSP AURUM CM Gold 650W
Sound: Integrated
Optical Drive: None
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 10 x64
Compared Hardware:
- Patriot Viper 4 PC4-22400 2x8GB @ DDR4-2800 16-18-18-36
- G.Skill Ripjaws V F4-3000C15D-16GVR 2x8GB @ DDR4-3000 15-15-15-35
- G.Skill Trident Z F4-3200C16D-16GTZ 2x8GB @ DDR4-3200 16-16-16-36
- Kingston HyperX Fury HX426C15FBK4/32 4x8GB @ DDR4-2666 15-17-17-35
Page Index
1. Introduction, Packaging, Specifications
2. A Closer Look, Test System
3. Benchmark: AIDA64 CPU
4. Benchmark: AIDA64 FPU
5. Benchmark: AIDA64 Memory
6. Benchmark: PCMark 8
7. Benchmark: 3DMark
8. Benchmark: PassMark PerformanceTest 8.0
9. Benchmark: SuperPI 1M, Cinebench R15
10. Overclocking and Conclusion
