Corsair has proved itself as one of the leaders of high-quality memory, designed for professional system builders and enthusiasts alike, while offering superb stability and overclocking potential. It’s managed to retain that crown for quite some time now, mostly thanks to the Vengeance Pro range that was released a couple of years ago.
Designed to work with third- and fourth-generation Intel processors, the Pro kits are available in a range of capacities and speeds. From an entry point of 1600MHz through to 2800MHz and available in an assortment of colours, the Vengeance Pro pretty much has something for everyone.
The 16GB kit we’re looking at in this instance is the 2x 8GB DDR3 2400MHz Red version, product code CMY16GX3M2A2400C11R. This is a newer batch of RAM kits, and while the older 2400MHz Vengeance Pro had latencies of 10-12-12-31, this newer version uses 11-13-13-31, with the voltage remaining the same at 1.65V.
The Red title is purely for show, it being the colour of the top of the heatsink. While that doesn’t have any bearing on how well the memory performs, it is available in blue, silver and gold, so it can match your LED setup, motherboard or whatever else you’ve installed in your PC.
In terms of overclocking potential, we managed to tune the speed up to a tad over 2500MHz on our motherboard, with everything remaining perfectly stable. We imagine that with a better motherboard in place you could tweak it further (2600MHz and beyond most likely), but as we didn’t have anything available, we had to make do with our current setup. Interestingly, the eight-layer PCB of the Vengeance Pro has been designed specifically with overclocking in mind, reducing electrical noise and allowing great optimisation and timings. In short, overclockers will enjoy fiddling around with the Pro kits to their hearts' content.
The height of the sticks are 44.5mm, which although are somewhat big aren’t the tallest RAM sticks we’ve ever come across. Generally speaking, you shouldn’t have too much difficulty with the majority of large CPU coolers, but as always it’s best to measure up the clearance before you commit to buying anything.
We used SiSoft Sandra for the memory benchmark, recording a good 31GB/s when not overclocked and managing 34GB/s when overclocked to 2525MHz. How those numbers fare in real world computing terms depends on the rest of your setup. Our gaming tests ran perfectly well, even Batman: Arkham Knight.
The only thing we didn’t like about the Vengeance Pro was the fact that the red-coloured aluminium strip on top of the heatsink could be unclipped rather too easily. If you remove the stick from the motherboard without taking care, the clip can come off and perhaps get wedged under the board or dropped or something. It’s unlikely but worth noting.
Overall, we were impressed with the Corsair Vengeance Pro 16GB kit. It’s priced at around £100 and offers great performance and good overclocking potential.