Page 2 - A Closer Look, Installation, Test System
Call it a marketing gimmick and whatnot, but it's impossible nowadays to find performance memory without any form of a heatspreader attached. They do serve a purpose in dissipating heat undeniably -- but most memory modules, unless ran at a voltage significantly over designed voltages, won't make make this feature a requirement. But hey -- at least it looks cool, haha. That said, the Patriot Extreme Performance PC3-14400 set comes with a heatspreader, as expected from performance memory products offered in this market. Patriot calls this the "Patriot Aluminum Bladed Heat Shield Technology", which refers to the strips of aluminum attached to both sides of the module's PCB. The constant variable thickness of the aluminum heatspreader is done by implementing lines of small ditches into its surface. This maximizes exposed surface area, thus transfers the heat as quickly as possible into surrounding environmental air.
Patriot's logo appears large and bold in the middle of one of the heatspreaders, while the other side is mostly plain with exception of the term "DDR3" printed at the top right corner. An information sticker is attached to the same headspreader that has the DDR3 text, as seen in the photo above. Information such as part number, stock frequency, latency, and voltages are printed on the sticker. It clearly states the words "Warranty void if removed" across the bottom of the sticker, although it's not physically blocking anything such as screws that holds the headspreader to the modules.
We can see that, while an aluminum headspreader is attached to the memory module on both sides, the memory integrated circuit chips are placed on only one side of the printed circuit board. This design is quite common, as we've seen in a variety of DDR3 RAM sets from manufacturers such as OCZ and Super Talent. The side without the memory ICs has a heatspreader on it mainly to serve a balanced aesthetic purpose.
Our photo above demonstrates a little more in regards to the wavy surface of the "Patriot Aluminum Bladed Heat Shield Technology" headspreader that maximizes heat transfer with its operating environment. The aluminum headspreaders are fixed to its contact surface using some high strength, thermally conductive adhesive strip. When we tried to remove the headspreader from our memory modules for this review, the high strength strip actually ripped off three memory chips with it. It has never happened to me before, and I definitely would not recommend you to try the same thing unless you want to waste some perfectly good DDR3 RAM.
While we destroyed a stick of RAM, Patriot was generous enough to let us exchange for a new set of identical kit to allow us to continue our testing. Above is the $100 photo haha. Maybe not as much as $100, but you get the idea.
As the Patriot Extreme Performance PC3-14400 2x1GB definitely won't be in the low-cost memory category anytime soon, this set is actually priced competitively in the retail market. Complete with Micron's excellent D9GTS chips that gained rave reviews amongst enthusiast for its excellent overclocking potential, this very attribute is good enough to justify many choices. We're particularly excited for the fact that it runs at DDR3-1800/8-8-8-20 at only 1.9V, I'll be excited to see what it can do with, maybe, say 2.1V-2.2V. The 8-8-8-20 1.9V for DDR3-1800 is a bit conservative from what I can see with this kind of ICs. Dong so will void your warranty, but it's always worth a look -- even at 2.1V should be fairly safe for modules with D9GTS. You shouldn't be too worried about heat either.
Lock and load -- the Patriot Extreme Performance PC3-14400 DDR3 is ready to go.
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 @ 2.80GHz (400MHz*7 - 1600MHz FSB QDR)
CPU Cooling: Asus Arctic Square
Motherboard: Gigabyte X48T-DQ6
Chassis: Danger Den Torture Rack (1x Thermaltake 120mm LED Fan)
Power: OCZ EliteXStream 800W
Video: Gigabyte GeForce 8800GT TurboForce 512MB
Optical Drive: Liteon 16X DVD-ROM
Hard Drive: Western Digital Caviar 7200RPM 80GB 8MB Cache
Operating System: Microsoft Windows XP Professional SP3
Compared hardware
- Super Talent Project X DDR3-1800 2x1GB @ 7-6-6-18 DDR3-1600 (Downclocked/Manufacturer defined settings)
- OCZ ReaperX HPC PC3-10666 Enhanced Bandwidth 2x1GB @ 6-5-5-18 DDR3-1280
- OCZ Special Ops Urban Elite PC3-10666 2x2GB @ 9-9-9-20 DDR3-1280
- Patriot Extreme Performance PC3-14400 2x1GB @ 7-7-7-18 DDR3-1600 (Downclocked/Manufacturer defined settings)
Some units were not tested at default specifications due to hardware limitations. In this review, all units were freshly retested, where some benchmark software used may have been updated -- therefore cannot be compared to our previous results.
Page Index
1. Introduction, Packaging, Specifications
2. A Closer Look, Installation, Test System
3. Benchmark: 3DMark06
4. Benchmark: PCMark05
5. Benchmark: EVEREST CPU
6. Benchmark: EVEREST FPU
7. Benchmark: EVEREST Memory
8. Benchmark: SuperPI, Cinebench R10
9. Overclocking Results and Conclusion
