Kingston's HyperX 2400 MHz 8GB X79 DDR3 RAM Dominates

We've done a lot of X79 platform DRAM testing in the past few months and one kit that we've been itching to test was one that ran at 2.4 GHz or 2400 MHz. After working closely with Kingston on our X79 RAM Roundup, we were happy to hear from them that they had a 2400 MHz kit for the X79 platform to test. We initially planned to include this kit in our RAM roundup but ran into motherboard issues which we will detail later.

We want to start this review off by saying that not all motherboards will be able to run 2400 MHz DDR3 in quad-channel and that we recommend checking with your motherboard vendor before actually buying this kit of RAM for your system. In our case, the Gigabyte X79-UD7 did support the 2400 MHz kit of RAM with XMP 2.0 settings, but only after a few BIOS updates. So keep that in mind.

Specifications

In our testing, we will be comparing Kingston's 8GB (4x2GB) CAS11 2400 MHz 1.65v (KHX2400C11D3K4/8GX)   kit against other X79 DDR3 kits of RAM. Keeping in mind that most of those kits are actually 16GB (4x4GB). We want to explore the benefits of going beyond 2133 MHz and see how much performance is really gained and whether or not its really worth the price.



The Kingston KHX2400C11D3K4/8GX kit is a CAS 11 kit which runs at 1.65v and is XMP 2.0 compatible. Meaning that you can run it on an Intel X79 motherboard with an Intel Sandy Bridge-E processor. This kit is comprised of four 2GB modules running in quad-channel. We were able to use the profile settings which meant a very simple and easy overclocked memory performance level. The actual latencies were a little different than what were were used to seeing as it was 11-13-13-30 rather than 11-13-11-30 which we've seen before. Perhaps, though, this slight tweak in latency will enable better and more stable clocks.

This kit of RAM actually has two different XMP profile settings, which we've never seen on a kit for X79 before. One setting is for 2400 MHz and the other is for 2133 MHz, indicating that perhaps Kingston recognizes that not all motherboards will be capable of supporting 2400 MHz and that perhaps users may want to use this kit in more than just one motherboard. Both these presets, though, run the kit of RAM at 1.64v which is already an overclocked voltage from the Sandy Bridge platform's standard of 1.5v.

If you'd like even more details regarding this kit, we managed to pull the full PDF spec sheet off of Kingston's website indicating the exact timings, voltages and dimensions.

System Setup



For our setup, we ran a Gigabyte X79-UD7 with all four sticks of 2GB running in quad-channel mode at 2400 MHz. We also had an Intel 3960X processor running at 3.7 GHz with Turbo mode and all other clock speed tweaks turned off. For our RAM testing we also made sure that the motherboard was getting as much power as possible so we plugged in both +12v CPU power connectors in addition to the 24-pin motherboard power connector. We did this primarily because we knew that the CPU IMC voltage and VTT would likely require more voltage for stable 2400MHz clock speeds. This was accomplished by our Coolermaster UCP 1100W PSU which we've been using for all our testing.