Corsair’s first DDR4 kit might make you want to pay more for your memory.
As someone who might have been Francis Bacon once said, “I am in blood stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er.” He wasn’t actually talking about some battle for a Scottish throne… he was referring to the fact that once you’ve spent a vast sum of money on a new X99 motherboard and Haswell-E processor, it’s as boring shopping about for a cheap memory kit as it just dropping another fortune on a high performance Corsair set. Prescient fellow, that Bacon.
Such ennui probably has something to do with the fact that your choice of memory module won’t make a huge difference to the overall PC experience, either. That’s going to be the tough ask for manufacturers of highperformance DDR4 memory modules in this new frontier of RAM: when even the cheap stuff has to match the new Intel platform’s 2,133MHz starting point, across four modules for the true quadchannel experience, you’re already talking about some seriously quick memory.
So what can faster stuff like the Corsair Vengeance kit do that the slightly slower Crucial kit can’t? The obvious answer is ”pretty much nothing”. As we said in the Crucial review, you can quickly get a picture of which of these kits is the higher-performing through synthetic benchmarking, but in real terms it’s far harder to see any performance difference. We would say that, because of the added little heatspreader Corsair has gone with for its Vengeance kit, we would expect it to last longer, but given the fact that both of these sets have lifetime warranties from suppliers like Overclockers, that’s close to becoming a moot point, too.
What the higher-spec Vengeance kit can offer, though, is XMP 2.0. And what does XMP stand for? Ease-of-use. Okay, the acronym doesn’t work, but with XMP you don’t have to worry about digging into the BIOS to get the best out of the kit, as you can set the modules to run at their quoted box settings from most BIOS front pages.
At 2,800MHz this Vengeance set offers a huge amount of memory bandwidth on our i7 5960X test machine, and posts the best performance numbers in all our tests bar memory latency. Corsair has also included a memory profile to run the kit at 3,000MHz – while still only hitting 1.35v – but strangely the performance after 2,800MHz drops off quite considerably. It almost goes down to its 2,133MHz base and explains why Corsair isn’t selling these modules at the higher clockspeed.
In head-to-head tests, this Corsair kit is clearly the better set of memory modules, but we do have to think about price. You’re not really getting a lot more, in real terms, by paying the price premium. That said, compared to the previous generation of memory, there’s not a huge premium shifting up to DDR4 anyway. In fact, you wont find a 16GB DDR3 kit rated at 2,800MHz any cheaper than these Corsair modules. In those terms, this kit is good value – these are leaner, cheaper, quicker modules than the last generation. The problem is, that doesn’t matter right now. Dave James
Vital Statistics
Price £290
Manufacturer Corsair
Web www.corsair.com
Memory type DDR4
Configuration Quad-channel
Capacity 16GB (4x 4GB)
Frequency 2,800MHz
CAS 16-18-18-36
Voltage 1.2v