Kingston Hyper X Genesis 10th
Anniversary Edition 16GB Kit
RRP: $225.99 | Website: www.kingston.com
Test Machine
• INTEL Core i7 4960X
• ASUS Rampage IV Extreme
Black Edition (0208)
• AMD Radeon R9 290X
• Corsair Force LS 240GB SSD
• Cooler Master Silent Pro M2
1500W
• Windows 7 64-bit SP1
(Catalyst 13.11)
K
ingston Hyper X memory
is likely the oldest
enthusiast series we
know of. Not surprising given
that Kingston is possibly the
oldest manufacture of high
speed DRAM. For all intents
and purposes, experienced
overclockers will remember
a set of Kingston Hyper X
memory at some point in their
overclocking history. This is
particularly true of the BH5 DDR
memory era. Most of us will
remember just how pervasive
the Hyper X 2x512MB 2-2-25 Memory was and virtually
everyone was operating these in
at 500MHz or higher.
24 The OverClocker Issue 27 | 2013
That was a long time ago
though and since then Kingston
has had various successes and
challenges. Much like most
memory vendors, the DRAM
industry has been both kind and
of late very challenging. For us
on the receiving end, we’re still
holding on to our DIMMS with
PSC chips and such, patiently
waiting for the day where we
may have champion memory
again reminiscent of the BH5/
BH6 and perhaps even TCCD
of old. Until that day, kits such
as we have here are what we
may expect from Kingston or at
least on the lower end of their
product range.
Kingston marked off this kit
as their anniversary addition,
celebrating exactly 10 years
of the Hyper X brand. If such
engraving means anything to
you, you’ll appreciate having a
limited edition set of memory.
We however are exclusively
focused on the performance or
at least in how far we can push
this set of memory before it
gives in. Usually we would test
this set on the Z87 platform,
but it is four sticks and we do
happen to have a particularly
useful platform for quad
channel kits. If there is ever
going to be a motherboard that
would push a set to its limits, it
would have to be the Rampage
IV Extreme Black Edition
and thus we tested on this
motherboard to see just how far
we could go.
We started at 2133MHz and
attempted to tighten the settings
as much as we could. With the
tightest primary timings set to
10-11-11-28-2T, our memory
was not able to go lower much
more than that. We could not
post at C9 thus we promptly
moved on to the next divider
available to us which was
2400MHz. Starting with the XMP
profile, we measured typical
results for this configuration.
Some tuning was in order for
the secondary and tertiary
timings which yielded much
improvement, but for the most
part the numbers you see here
are only those reported by the