Review: X79 Memory Roundup

As many of you may already know, the X79 motherboard combined with the Core i7 3960X is an extremely powerful platform for nearly anything you want to do. One key component of this platform is the fact that it supports Quad-Channel memory which results in a whole lot of memory bandwidth and memory slots. Most X79 motherboards either feature 4 DIMM slots or 8 DIMM slots depending on whether or not the manufacturer wants to tailor it for overclocking as many overclocking X79 boards only feature 4 DIMM slots or a single Quad-Channel setup.

All that aside, we are here to analyze the performance differences between different kits as well as the overclockability of certain kits to see which kits give you the best absolute performance and which ones give you the best absolute value.

For this review, we will be testing these 16GB (4x4GB) kits of RAM on our Gigabyte X79-UD7 board instead of the Intel provided DX79SI board as that board really struggled with memory stability when overclocked and generally had issues overclocking RAM. So, when you're looking into buying an X79 board consider this factor as some boards are better for overclocking RAM than others. We will also be running the board without any turbo settings or anything that could cause slight variations in the cache bandwidth, base clock, or memory performance in general. As such, we manually set the CPU to 3.7GHz and simply left it there, so if some 1600MHz benchmarks seem slower than something you may have benchmarked on your own, the likelihood is that you probably had turbo enabled and we don't.

In addition to that, we are going to focus heavily on price/performance as well as overclockability of the RAM. To us, overclocking is the ultimate value proposition as well as a measure of what kind of quality you're dealing with. We will illustrate what kind of clocks we managed to attain as well as what kind of performance resulted from those overclocks.

In this roundup we will have the following kits of RAM:

Corsair Vengeance 1866MHz 16GB (4x4GB) CL9 1.5v -CMZ16GX3M4X1866C9R

Kingston HyperX Genesis 1600MHz 16GB (4x4GB) CL9 1.65v - KHX1600C9D3K4/16GX

Kingston HyperX Genesis 2133MHz 16GB (4x4GB) CL11 1.65v - KHX2133C11D3K4/16GX

Patriot Division 4 Viper Extreme 1600MHz 16GB (4x4GB) CL8 1.65v - PXQ316G1600LLQK