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

Overclocking

When it came to overclocking, it was a pretty interesting story. Initially attaining 2400 MHz was a problem on our Gigabyte X79 motherboard primarily because the BIOS was not mature when we first started testing and had to wait for subsequent BIOS to resolve those issues. Only once we flashed with the F7 bios for the Gigabyte X79-UD7 were we able to attain 2400 MHz in a stable manner via XMP 2.0 profile settings. Considering that this board officially only supports 2133 MHz and that the X79 platform only really states that it supports 1600 MHz, we're quite happy with our results.

We made many attempts to pass 2400 MHz in our overclocking sessions, but simply could not obtain a stable result whatsoever. We may continue to try testing with this kit and will try on other X79 boards. As it stands, for the X79-UD7 we do not recommend upgrading to the F8 BIOS as it actually made the XMP 2.0 setting for 2400 MHz unstable. Even though, the initial purpose of the F8 BIOS in the release notes specifically stated improved 2400 MHz compatibility.


Value

When it comes to the Kingston HyperX Genesis 2400 MHz DDR3 kit of RAM, this kit is surprisingly not that overpriced. Granted, it is only 8GB, rather than the 16GB that most of the other X79 RAM we tested. But, at $208 (on Kingston's site only) this RAM really isn't that much more overpriced than its competition. There is a caveat, though, since many 8GB kits that are made up of only 2 sticks cost less than this kit does, but those are retail prices and the retail price of this kit will likely be closer to Kingston's competition. Most of those kits come in at around $170 and the 16GB 2400 MHz kits are going for around $300. There is a difference, though, since there is no guarantee that those 2-stick configurations will actually work in a 4-stick X79 board at full speed.



Another factor that you have to consider is that this RAM does work extremely well for the X79 platform and gave the best performance of all the kits we tested, including the 16GB kit of Kingston DDR 2133 MHz which we overclocked to 2400 MHz. Our findings and the ease of getting 2400 MHz to work with the right BIOS do indicate to us that the $208 sticker price is well worth the memory bandwidth and performance. But, there is competition out there that does offer an XMP 2.0 X79 certified 16GB kit for $299. So, we expect Kingston to possibly release something similar in the near future to compete with them.

The real problem with this kit, and many like it is that they are simply unavailable. At the given moment, only 4 kits are available, and the Kingston kit is not one of them (not even listed). We did find it somewhere else for $182, but they also don't have it in stock either, so we're not sure whether their price is valid.

Conclusion


From our findings in all of our benchmarks and reviews, there is no doubt that the 8GB Kingston HyperX 2400 MHz DD3 kit for Intel's X79 platform is the fastest we've tested. Also, taking into consideration the price and the fact that this kit is 8GB, this kit is only for those that really intend to go for maximum memory bandwidth without spending $300.

Considering that the platform appears to be the limiting factor in getting memory overclocked past 2400 MHz, we really won't hold it against Kingston or any memory manufacturer for having a kit of RAM that doesn't overclock well. Since 2400 MHz is already quite heavily overclocked for the X79 platform and that we nearly touched 50 GB/s of memory bandwidth, we can say that this kit of RAM enables users to extremely easily enable very highly overclocked RAM without having to worry much about instability.

As such, we would like to award the Kingston HyperX Genesis 2400 MHz DDR3 kit our Editor's Choice Prosumer Award for being the fastest kit we've tested to date by a fair margin.