We had the chance to stop by the Kingston Suite and see some of their new products. When were entered the “demo” area the first thing that grabbed my attention was a system with a label that told us it had 16G of DDR3 1600 memory inside. Above this was an odd item though, it was a panoramic picture. From a distance it looked like an acrylic painting. After walking over I noticed that is matched an image that was visible in an open instance of Photoshop CS4.
When I asked about this setup I was told that it was a display of their new HyperX DDR3 1600 16GB kit [4x 4GB] for 1156 Core i7 and Core i5. The demo was actually based around some pretty serious Photoshop work. What Kingston has done is to take three sets of twelve images and stich each set into a vectored panoramic. Now on its own stitching these images together can put a nice dent in your available memory, but there is more to this demo than just that. The three sets represent an exposure bracketed set. This is [for those of you that might not be into photography] that the shots were over exposed [to get more light] underexposed [for deeper shadows] and at the correct exposure. Kingston then took the sets, while still using 14GB of the available 16GB, and combined them into a single HDR image inside Photoshop. The HRD conversion was almost instant and the system never faltered even while the available memory usage hit close to the 16GB mark. Now if you are like me and rely on Photoshop just about every day this is great news. It means that you can stop worrying about your scratch disk and run even complex functions all in RAM.
Kingston has not left out all of you 1366 Core i7 owners either; they have a massive 24GB kit for you. Their demo for this one was a little offbeat though. Instead of running another massive HDR image combination they chose to use the memory up in a more aggressive way. They installed VMWare Server and in the guest OS pulled the majority of the memory to handle open and active application windows inside of it. While this is undoubtedly not a common usage of RAM many developers and prosumers will use VMWare to run many different compatible operating systems [depending on their work]. Each of these will eat up your available system RAM in a serious way. To give you an example, running VMWare Workstation 7 [which is much more memory efficient than the free VMWare server a typical Windows Vista or Windows 7 guest OS install can eat up about 1GB [if you only use the bare minimum] just at idle. Now if you open up IE 8, Outlook 2007, etc. it adds up fast. Now, to give you a little more insight into why this is important, VMWare will dynamically swap available memory between the guest and host OS. If there is any instability in the RAM you are looking at problems. Your guest can become a memory hole that seems to eat up what you have. Some of the symptoms of this can include an inability to get out of the guest OS, no network communication… well you get the picture. For Kingston to show off a large density kit running at high speeds with this stability is a great indication of Kingston’s commitment to providing rock solid performance in their products.
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