Kingston HyperX DDR3 RAM

DDR2 RAM has reached its maximum limit, supporting 1066 million data

transfers per second with a peak transfer rate of 8,500 Gbps. But with new OSs

like Vista, 3D cards and gaming applications, there's demand for even higher

transfer speeds. That's why RAM manufacturers are coming out with DDR3 RAM. We

received a pair of 1 GB modules of Kingston's latest HyperX DDR3 RAM They have

blue colored heat spreaders that work quite well, preventing the RAM from

overheating. The modules support 1.9 GHz frequency, and we tested them in dual

mode on a PC with an Intel Core2Duo E6750 2.66 GHz processor, an Asus P5k3

Deluxe motherboard, and ATI Radeon X1950XTX 512 MB graphics card. We ran PCMark

05, which does a series of read, write, copy and latency tests with a varying

load of 16 MB to 4 KB. The RAM modules scored 5851 PCMarks, which is quite

impressive considering the 5900 PCMarks scored by Kingston's DDR2 800 MHz RAM

modules we reviewed last year. This clearly indicates the performance that DDR3

RAM modules can achieve. This performance however, will come at the cost of

compatibility. They are incompatible with DDR2 RAM slots owing to their

different key notch location.

Bottomline: Overall, these RAM modules

give excellent performance, but their cost is still on the higher side compared

to equivalent DDR2 modules.