Kingston HyperX PC3500 DDR RAM

Company: Kingston Technology
Product: 512MB PC3500 DDR RAM
Street Price: ~$225 USD
Date Reviewed: December 6, 2002
Reviewed By: Joey C. aka Chong345
Overall Rating: (9/10)

Introduction:

Kingston is definitely a company that needs no introduction. They have been around for years supplying various types of memory for all different platforms, some of the large OEMs even use their memory. Their reputation is excellent due to their high quality memory modules and good support. However, Kingston hasn't exactly been known to cater to the overclocking crowd in the past. Recently Kingston released a HyperX memory line that is designed with the gamers & "PC enthusiasts" in mind. The memory is tested for high overclocking as well as higher stock speeds. The HyperX line includes PC3000 and PC3500 modules. Today we are going to look at the 512 MB stick of PC3500.

Examining the Memory:

The modules come in both 256 MB (single bank) and 512 MB (dual bank) versions. The rated timings for the HyperX PC3500 modules are CAS 2 4-4-8-1T. The timings do look strange but so did Corsair’s XMS3500 when they first released it. Kingston tested the memory to run at 434 MHz DDR. The memory uses aluminum heat spreaders like many other memory manufacturers have chosen to do. This will help to dissipate heat from the memory chips due to high overclocking and voltages. We are not sure if the modules will be available with different colored heat spreaders but for now, this one is blue. One more note about this memory is that it, like all of Kingston’s memory, is backed by a lifetime guarantee. The memory looks very good and with a name like HyperX, we were anxious to get to overclocking.

Test Setup & Benchmarks:

Just like in the last PC3500 reviews that we have done, we will again be using our super-cooled Pentium 4 2.26 CPU. This helps to eliminate problems in overclocking the memory since we will also be overclocking the processor by raising the FSB. We do not want the CPU to hold us back from finding the max speed of the memory so a constant 1.8V was used during testing while the CPU was kept at -8C.

For the first part of the testing, we just ran the memory at 333 MHz just to make sure that it worked fine and that there were no incompatibilities. The timings used were set to the most aggressive at 2-5-2-2. The memory ran fine at stock voltages with these timings. Next, we wanted to see just how far the memory would go with these timings. Surprisingly it would not go much higher until we changed the Active to Precharge Delay from 5 to 6. Now that we were able to go higher, we tested DDR 400 out. The memory did well passing all the benchmarks using 2.8V. The memory finally maxed out using the 2-6-2-2 timings at 416 MHz DDR with 2.8V. Most motherboards only allow a maximum of 2.8V for the DIMMs. The memory was actually able to go to 426 MHz with the 2-6-2-2 timings using 2.95V. This is impressive since the memory is capable of running almost at its rated speed with more aggressive timings than what is recommended by Kingston. Any higher voltages did not help at all using these timings to go beyond 426 MHz DDR but the memory did very well.

Continue To Page 2 For More Benchmarks & Conclusion -->