Page 2 - A Closer Look, Test System
The Silicon Power Xpower PC3-19200 2x8GB, being a part of the performance DDR3 line from the company, utilizes a set of medium profile heatspreaders. The bright red finish immediately grabs your attention, while the aluminum pieces are conservatively shaped and styled. This, in contrast with its green PCB, really creates a Christmas overtone -- but before you start blasting 'O Holy Night' in your car, it is still August. Aluminum is lightweight, and serves as a decent heat conductor, while the toothed and ventilated heatsink design at the top improves air ventilation for faster heat dissipation (Although it is probably more for style in this particular application). Generally speaking, it is slightly taller than modules with no heatspreaders at all. This may be useful for systems equipped with side mounted CPU heatsink fans adjacent to the memory slots, as the Xpower can piggy-back off the generated airflow. Fortunately, they are only about a centimeter taller than modules with no heatspreaders at all, so it is quite likely for the Xpower to fit under a well-designed cooler with sufficient clearance room. 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 Silicon Power Xpower modules is symmetrical, which is fairly logical, because memory ICs reside on both sides of the relatively traditional green PCB. Besides functional purposes, it also improves the look. The company's logo is printed directly onto a label over the aluminum surfaces. Meanwhile, a specifications sticker is applied on one side of each module. It has the Silicon Power logo, kit name (SP016GXLYU240NDA), speed, CAS latency, and module capacity. I do not believe they come with unique serial numbers.
As you can see more clearly in our photo above, the Silicon Power Xpower PC3-19200 2x8GB has a traditional green PCB. Personally, I am a fan of black soldermask, but with a heatspreader over the board FR-4, I doubt anyone can see it once it is installed in your case. Meanwhile, its heatspreader on top is composed of two separate pieces, which are not physically interlinked. Instead, the heatspreader is held to the module itself by a strip of thermally conductive adhesive. The adhesive force between the two heatspreader and memory ICs is not particularly strong, but if you ever do take them off, keep your hair dryer around for a safer procedure.
From our above photo, it should also be clearer on how the heatspreaders are designed. The top edge is curved inwards on both pieces, and meets its corresponding section from the other half piece at the top for a complete mirror image. For simplicity's sake, they are all the same size. As the teeth are made from very thin aluminum, it does not hold a lot of heat, therefore dissipating the heat energy relatively quickly into the surrounding environment. Despite using very thin aluminum, the short and simple design makes it quite ample in resisting bending forces under normal usage. 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, you may 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 Silicon Power Xpower PC3-19200 2x8GB dual channel memory kit. The photo above should be quite clear -- it says "H5TQ4G83MFR" on each IC. These are SK Hynix manufactured chips, with eight 512MB chips on each side for a total of 8GB on each DIMM. We have seen these chips in the past before; they can be found in the Patriot Viper 3 Low Profile PC3-17000 4x8GB and Kingston HyperX Beast KHX21C11T3K2/16X 2x8GB. As mentioned on the previous page, these RAM modules run at a frequency of DDR3-2400 with 11-13-13 latencies at 2T command rate. They operate at a stock voltage of 1.65V, which is just on the Core i3/i5/i7 maximum safe limit. Here is a table of specifications for the ICs, as obtained from Hynix's website:
- VDD=VDDQ=1.5V +/- 0.075V
- Fully differential clock inputs (CK, /CK) operation
- Differential Data Strobe (DQS, /DQS)
- On chip DLL align DQ, DQS and /DQS transition with CK transition
- DM masks write data-in at the both rising and falling edges of the data strobe
- All addresses and control inputs except data, data strobes and data masks latched on the rising edges of the clock
- Programmable CAS latency 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11, 13 supported
- Programmable additive latency 0, CL-1, and CL-2 supported
- Programmable CAS Write latency (CWL) = 5, 6, 7, 8
- Programmable burst length 4/8 with both nibble
- sequential and interleave mode
- BL switch on the fly
- 8banks
- Average Refresh Cycle (Tcase of 0c~ 95c) - 7.8 µs at 0c ~ 85c; 3.9 µs at 85c ~ 95c
- JEDEC standard 78ball FBGA(x4/x8), 96ball FBGA (x16)
- Driver strength selected by EMRS
- Dynamic On Die Termination supported
- Asynchronous RESET pin supported
- ZQ calibration supported
- TDQS (Termination Data Strobe) supported (x8 only)
- Write Levelization supported
- 8 bit pre-fetch
Our test configuration as follows:
CPU: Intel Core i7-3770K @ 4.6GHz
CPU Cooling: Noctua NH-D15S
Motherboard: ASUS P8P67 WS Revolution
Graphics: Gigabyte G1 Gaming GeForce GTX 960 4GB
Chassis: SilverStone Temjin TJ04-E (Noctua NF-S12A PWM, Noctua NF-P12 PWM)
Storage: OCZ Vector 150 240GB; Crucial MX200 500GB
Power: PC Power & Cooling Silencer Mk III 1200W
Sound: Auzentech X-Fi Bravura
Optical Drive: LiteOn iHAS224-06 24X DVD Writer
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 8.1 Professional
Compared Hardware:
- Silicon Power Xpower PC3-19200 2x8GB @ DDR3-2400 11-13-13-32
- Kingston HyperX Beast KHX21C11T3K2/16X 2x8GB @ DDR3-2133 11-12-11-30
- Kingston HyperX Predator KHX18C9T2K2/16X 2x8GB @ DDR3-1866 9-10-9-27
- Kingston HyperX Savage HX324C11SRK2/16 2x8GB @ DDR3-2400 11-13-14-32
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
