Review: X79 Memory Roundup

Overclocking
From our experience, the lower clocked kits yielded us the largest overclocking margins. We managed to take both the Patriot 1600MHz and Kingston 1600MHz kits to 2133MHz. We also were able to take the Corsair Vengeance 1866MHz kit to 2133MHz, we unfortunately hit a wall once we pushed for 2400MHz with that kit. With the Kingston 2133MHz kit, we managed to squeeze out 2400MHz and as you can see in our SuperPi overclocking results, it also was the best performing kit as well.



Overall, most of these kits overclocked pretty well, but people do need to keep in mind that not all X79 boards are created equally and not all of them are going to be able to squeeze a 533MHz OC on a 1600MHz kit of RAM. So if you want to overclock your RAM do your research first before buying, because not all of these X79 boards really can handle higher clocked RAM especially overclocked RAM.

Note that both our 1600MHz kits, when overclocked to 2133MHz actually had beaten our Kingston 2133MHz kit of RAM running at exactly the same timings and voltages.


Value
The kits we have in hand have the following retail prices:
Kingston HyperX Genesis 1600MHz - $89
Patriot 1600MHz Viper Extreme 4 - TBD (similar slightly slower kit goes for $82.99 on Newegg)
Corsair Vengeance 1866MHz - $159
Kingston HyperX Genesis 2133MHz - $318

Based upon these prices and the performance we saw, the Kingston HyperX Genesis 1600MHz provides one of the best values for the consumer not looking to overclock their memory. Even so, if one does choose to overclock their memory, this kit can easily handle 2133MHz. This is in contrast to our Patriot Viper Extreme 1600MHz kit which didn't do too well at stock compared to the Kingston, but overclocked very well and outperformed the overclocked Kingston kit.

We feel that the Kingston 2133MHz kit is a little over priced at $318 considering that it was actually beaten by the 1600MHz kits which cost 1/3 the price when overclocked. Granted, the 2133MHz did overclock higher and deliver faster performance, but it is always going to be the question of whether or not it's worth paying for the guaranteed performance.

The Corsair kit sort of looms in between all of the kits as it delivers a price that isn't far off from the 1600MHz kits, but it promises higher performance and overclocking at a lower voltage which means that there's a chance of even more overclocking if the motherboard cooperates. Looking back at our scores, we believe that the Corsair Vengeance kit provides the best performance out of all of the kits that we have without actually spending 2-3x the price of the cheapest kit. Relative to all of the other kits, the Vengeance kit is probably the best 'performance' kit for the money as the Kingston kit just feels too expensive.



Conclusion
There is a lot that happened during the course of this review and we were really surprised to see such a mixed bag of results on a whole bunch of fronts. We were pretty satisfied with most of the overclocks that we got out of all the kits of RAM we had been running and we really weren't disappointed with any of the kits of RAM. The performance that we saw was simply astonishing and the overclockability of some of these kits is really quite awesome.

From our deductions based on performance and value, taking overclocking into consideration, we're inclined to say that its effectively a tie between the Kingston HyperX Genesis and the Patriot Viper Extreme 4 even though its clear that they don't actually perform the same, but rather they perform very closely to each other and trade punches. To us, the overclocked speed of the Patriot Viper Extreme Div 4 1600MHz kit really saved it from being handily beaten by the Kingston HyperX Genesis 1600MHz kit.

As such, since both of these kits are a tie in our eyes we would like to give both of them our value award for being extremely affordable but also providing an extremely good value when overclocked.

As for our editor's choice, it was a very hard decision to make as both the Vengeance and HyperX Genesis high performance kits did very well in terms of performance. The only problem is that the Kingston HyperX kit costs twice as much as the Corsair Vengeance kit. Because of the relatively negligible performance differences between these two kits, we're more comfortable with awarding the editor's choice to the Corsair Vengeance 1866MHz kit.