By: Hai Wang
October 1, 2021
One of my favorite outdoor family activities during summer and fall is to explore different playgrounds in my city. A few days ago, when I was walking in a community playground, I found a very interesting pump track. I saw some kids riding their mountain bikes on the track, which brought me back some of my childhood memories. I remember I got my first mountain bike when I was about twelve years old and it pretty exciting. The bike looked so legit since it had an eighteen-speed shifter and a straight handle bar. I thought I could do the same thing as those mountain bike racers did in TV. One day, I took my bike out to have some off-road fun. I tried to jump over a small bump when going downhill. The landing was somehow successful, but I ended up with a broken front wheel. The lesson I learned was, even though it looked almost like a real mountain bike, it was not actually meant to be jumped. If I looked more carefully, I should have realized my bike did not have any suspensions, unlike those ones on TV. It was just a cheap road bike with some resemblance to a mountain bike. I think it is quite similar to buying computer parts. Things with fancy RGB LEDs may not necessarily mean they are high-performance components. For today’s review unit, the XPG Spectrix D45G DDR4 3600 2x8GB memory kit, it has RGB LEDs, so it looks like gaming RAM. Does this product really have the matching performance? Let us read on and find out!
The XPG Spectrix D45G DDR4-3600 2x8GB arrived in a medium-sized FedEx-branded padded envelope from the ADATA's American headquarters in Brea, California. As you can see from the above photo, the package was pretty beat up when it arrived on our doorstep here in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. I do not want to blame the FedEx International 2day too much, since the products inside of the somewhat crushed retail boxes were intact. There were two products in the shipping package. One was this today's review unit, the XPG Spectrix D45G DDR4-3600 2x8GB, while the other one was the XPG Gammix S70 Blade 1TB, which was reviewed by my colleague Jonathan few weeks ago.
I always believe a good retail box design is essential to allow the product to be commercially successful. This is especially true for shelf-displayed computer parts. A particular product is usually stocked with dozens of other products of the same kind on the shelf. As such, the retail box needs to persuade potential customers to choose it over other competitors. A good retail box design should convey the information of the design language, or the uniqueness, of the actual product, such that the customer’s attention can be quickly attracted. For the XPG Spectrix D45G DDR4-3600 2x8GB, I think the retail package does a very good job in terms of attracting customers. One of the biggest reasons is the red theme color of the box. To me, it is like a red Ferrari parking in a local Walmart's parking lot with gray or white minivans around. On the front cover of the retail box, we can see a nice photo of the memory itself. The RGB feature of this product is also displayed here, since we have multiple icons to show the RGB LED compatibility with several mainstream motherboard brands in the market. The detailed information of this memory kit such as the capacity and speed are not printed in the front. To know more about this product, we need to see the flip side of the retail box. The two open windows on the back which allow us to see the actual hardware of the memory kit. In general, this retail box is nice and simple.
Before we move on to see the details of this product, let us take a look at the specifications from the manufacturer's website:
Color: Black
Capacity: 8GB: 8GB x1, 16GB: 8GB x2, 16GB x1, 32GB: 16GB x2, 32GB x1
Dimensions (L x H x W): 133.35 x 45.26 x 8.2mm
Weight: 66g
Operating Temperature: 0°C to 85°C
Operating Voltage: 1.2V ~1.45V
Warranty: Limited lifetime warranty
Now the box is opened, and you can see there are two RAM modules in the XPG Spectrix D45G DDR4-3600 kit. The memory kit is nicely secured by the plastic container. The container can protect the product from getting damaged. I actually found one corner of the container was damaged when I opened it for the first time. Fortunately, it was the container took the hit and not the product itself. The stickers on the RAM modules that show the details of the product can be seen through the transparent container.
The motherboard I used for testing of this product was Gigabyte Z390 I AORUS PRO WiFi, which has two DIMM slots. When I first turned on the computer, I found the default speed of the memory was set at DDR4-2666. I went into the BIOS to change the XMP profile, so the memory could operate at DDR4-3600 with 18-22-22-44 latencies. The above screenshot shows the SPD tab in CPU-Z with the review unit installed. The information in SPD tab shows the standard JEDEC specifications and XMP profiles programmed into the memory. At launch, the XPG Spectrix D45G DDR4-3600 2x8GB has a retail price of $90 USD.
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 10
7. Benchmark: 3DMark
8. Benchmark: PassMark PerformanceTest 10
9. Benchmark: SuperPI 1M, Cinebench R23
10. Overclocking and Conclusion
