Corsair, Kingston, OCZ & Super Talent DDR3 Roundup

Final Thoughts & Conclusions

After running these four enthusiast series by four different companies, it’s obvious which ones stand out from the crowd and which ones fail to. The Kingston HyperX PC3-11000 2GB memory kit was by far the front runner throughout and if that wasn’t shocking enough, it was the lowest priced kit of the two available to purchase today! At $448.49 the HyperX kit was $44.51 lower priced than the $493.00 Corsair XMS3 DHX memory kit and offered better performance and tighter timings than it’s more expensive counter part.

The 2GB 1333MHz DDR3 kits that we looked at from OCZ and Super Talent are both missing in action when it comes to availability, which makes it hard to compare them to the kits that are readily available on the market. The Super Talent kit looks good and ran well, but had a noticeable performance hits in tests like Everest 4.00 Read, where is was ~7% slower than some of the other kits. From my experience, this is is likely due to the PCB Super Talent is using or some critical factory set SPD setting that not optimized correctly. The OCZ DDR3 PC3-10666 Platinum Dual Channel memory kit (OCZ3P13332GK) performed near or at the top in all the testing and depending on its pricing it may or not be the best bang for your buck once it is released.

As with everything in the hardware industry, things change so fast that by the time you read an article or review the information is already old and outdated. The day before this article was to be posted Kingston announced a new Ultra Low Latency HyperX part at 1375MHz that operates at CL5 timings and Corsair let us know that they will have new parts ready for testing next week. It looks like a part two is coming, but for now at least you know how these four brands of DDR3 memory compare to each other and which to get.

Legit Bottom Line: After taking a look at these four DDR3 kits it’s clear that the Kingston HyperX PC3-11000 is the clear choice as it overclocks the highest at tight timings and won more benchmarks than any other kit. The fact that it’s also the lowest priced kit of the ones that are available doesn’t hurt anything either!