Patriot Viper III Review: 2x4 GB at DDR3-2400 C10-12-12 1.65 V
by Ian Cutress on November 18, 2013 1:00 PM ESTMarket Positioning
Typically our market position examination is done through Newegg, although an issue comes through that the PV38G240C0K kit we are testing is not actually listed. The alternative PV38G240C1K kit, a 2400 C11 2x4 GB kit, retails for $92 at Newegg, but our kit being tested today is more expensive than this when we look elsewhere:
Amazon.com: $116.80
NCIX: CAD$100
Amazon.co.uk: £95.92
If we take the Amazon.com pricing list, when comparing to other 2x4 GB 2400 C10 kits, we get the following:
$72: Team Xtreem LV, TXD38G2400HC10QDC01
$81: G.Skill TridentX, F3-2400C10D-8GTX
$88: G.Skill RipjawsZ, F3-2400C10D-8GZH
$88: G.Skill Trident, F3-2400C10D-8GTD
$92: Patriot Viper III, Black Mamba 2400 C11 (PV38G240C1K)
$107: Avexir Core (Blue), AVD3U24001004G-2CI
$117: Patriot Viper III, Black Mamba (PV38G240C0K)
From this list it would seem that a sub-$75 value would undercut memory kits from G.Skill, but at $117 or even $92, it does price itself out of the market somewhat. $80 would bring it down to $10/GB, whereas $117 means $14.63 per GB. There are better deals when buying 16 GB memory kits, in terms of cost per GB, although it comes with the added expense.
Test Bed
| Processor |
Intel Core i7-4770K Retail @ 4.0 GHz 4 Cores, 8 Threads, 3.5 GHz (3.9 GHz Turbo) |
| Motherboards | ASRock Z87 OC Formula/AC |
| Cooling |
Corsair H80i Thermalright TRUE Copper |
| Power Supply | Corsair AX1200i Platinum PSU |
| Memory |
ADATA XPG V2 DDR3-2400 C11-13-13 1.65V 2x8 GB Patriot Viper III DDR3-2400 C10-12-12 1.65V 2x4 GB |
| Memory Settings | XMP |
| Discrete Video Cards |
AMD HD5970 AMD HD5870 |
| Video Drivers | Catalyst 13.6 |
| Hard Drive | OCZ Vertex 3 256GB |
| Optical Drive | LG GH22NS50 |
| Case | Open Test Bed |
| Operating System | Windows 7 64-bit |
| USB 3 Testing | OCZ Vertex 3 240GB with SATA->USB Adaptor |
Many thanks to...
We must thank the following companies for kindly donating hardware for our test bed:
Thank you to OCZ for providing us with 1250W Gold Power Supplies.
Thank you to Corsair for providing us with an AX1200i PSU, and Corsair H80i CLC
Thank you to ASUS for providing us with the AMD GPUs and some IO Testing kit.
Thank you to ECS for providing us with the NVIDIA GPUs.
Thank you to Rosewill for providing us with the 500W Platinum Power Supply for mITX testing, BlackHawk Ultra, and 1600W Hercules PSU for extreme dual CPU + quad GPU testing, and RK-9100 keyboards.
Thank you to ASRock for providing us with the 802.11ac wireless router for testing.
‘Performance Index’
In our Haswell memory overview, I introduced a new concept of ‘Performance Index’ as a quick way to determine where a kit of various speed and command rate would sit relative to others where it may not be so obvious. As a general interpretation of performance in that review, the performance index (PI) worked well, showing that memory kits with a higher PI performed better than those that a lower PI. There were a few circumstances where performance was MHz or CL dominated, but the PI held strong for kit comparisons.
The PI calculation and ‘rules’ are fairly simple:
- Performance Index = MHz divided by CL
- Assuming the same kit size and installation location are the same, the memory kit with the higher PI will be faster
- Memory kits similar in PI should be ranked by MHz
- Any kit 1600 MHz or less is usually bad news.
That final point comes about due to the law of diminishing returns – in several benchmarks in our Haswell memory overview performed very poorly (20% worse or more) with the low end MHz kits. In that overview, we suggested that an 1866 C9 or 2133 C10 might be the minimum suggestion, whereas 2400 C10 covers the sweetspot should any situation demand good memory.
With this being said, the results for our kits are as follows:
The Patriot kit starts with a very healthy PI of 240, which we mentioned can reach 266 when overclocked.
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48 Comments
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mfenn - Tuesday, November 19, 2013 - link
Expanding upon this point: the data in Anandtech articles is always top notch, but it is becoming more and more obvious that there are two tiers of reviewers when it comes to delivering insight. Anand, Brian, Ryan, and Jarred write good conclusions based on their data and don't care about any blowback from the manufacturers. Dustin and Ian seem beholden to the manufacturer's PR departments and just parrot whatever talking points they're given. It's really disappointing.Gen-An - Tuesday, November 19, 2013 - link
And who exactly do you think is going to be interested in a kit like this, other than overclockers? The review fit the product and the target audience. It's not for general users, never will be, and doesn't need to be reviewed as if it were.Gen-An - Monday, November 18, 2013 - link
Patriot has changed the ICs on this kit without changing the SKU. I have two of the 2x4GB kits that only have 8 chips on a single side of the PCB and none on the other, and use Hynix H5TQ4G83MFR 4Gbit ICs (the same ones that are on those DDR3-3000+ kits) and clock accordingly. One kit I bought but took back was like these in the review, double-sided sticks with 16 chips per stick (8 per side) and using a relatively new IC, Hynix H5TQ2G83DFR, which can't clock as high as H5TQ2G83CFR unfortunately.IanCutress - Monday, November 18, 2013 - link
With the demand for MFR seemingly strong, and other companies other than Patriot going after 2400MHz and up, I guess going to CFR was more a financial choice.Companies seem rather reluctant to tell me which ICs they use, and popping a heatspreader off is no mean feat nowadays, with accidents happening regularly: http://forum.hwbot.org/showpost.php?p=207472&p...
That's compounded by the fact that sometimes the IC # is removed and replaced with the company name over and over. Any suggestions?
Gen-An - Tuesday, November 19, 2013 - link
CFR would have been preferable to DFR, which as you review and this one show, doesn't like going higher than 2600: http://www.techstation.it/articoli/patriot-viper-i...chekk42 - Monday, November 18, 2013 - link
Ian, whatever happened to low latencies? I'm currently running a 1600MHz CL7 kit which I bought 2+ years ago, but I only ever see CL9 (and up) kits in reviews or for sale these days.joos2000 - Monday, November 18, 2013 - link
Lower latencies doesn't yield the same performance returns as upping the clock frequencies, that's why.http://www.anandtech.com/show/7364/memory-scaling-...
ShieTar - Tuesday, November 19, 2013 - link
The reason is that defining latency as a multiple of clocks is rather silly with a large range of clock speeds available concurrently. What your CL7 means is that you have a latency of 4.38 ns (7/1600MHz). The fastest latencies in other clockings available are:1066 CL7 => 6.56 ns
1333 CL7 => 5.25 ns
1600 CL6 => 3.75 ns (But only on 2GB kits)
1866 CL8 => 4.29 ns
2133 CL9 => 4.22 ns
2400 CL9 => 3.75 ns
2666 CL10 => 3.75 ns
2800 CL11 => 3.93 ns
3000 CL11 => 3.67 ns
So as a matter of fact, all kits tested in this review, except for the ADATA ones, have shorter latencies than your own set.
Gigaplex - Tuesday, November 19, 2013 - link
You missed the part where they asked for low latency 1600 and you quoted a 1600 at CL6 without saying where it's from. Like they said, most 1600 kits come at around CL9 which is around 5.63ns. This matters somewhat when Intel CPUs such as the i7 4770K are rated at 1600, any higher and you're running out of spec.ShieTar - Tuesday, November 19, 2013 - link
Not sure how I "missed" that, it doesn't say anything about a 1600 kit at CL9 in the question :" I only ever see CL9 (and up) kits in reviews "
Well, most kits in reviews and announced sales are probably not 1600 at this point in time. In the review above you see 5 kits at 2400+, with only a single 1600 kit thrown in for completeness. So I assumed that the original poster was expecting DDR3 2400 to also come with CL7. Sorry if that assumption was incorrect.
The quoted CL6 kits are "OCZ Reaper HPC Edition" (OCZ3RPR1600C6LV4GK) and "Super Talent Chrome Series" (WB160UX6G6). I think both are actually discontinued, because you can buy a 2400 CL9 set and just run it at 1600 CL6. As shown above, you could even buy a 2400 CL10 set and get a little lucky and still run it at 1600 CL6 (same latency as the tested 1866 CL7)
So sure, DDR3 1600 kits are rarely sold with very low latencies today, that's because low-latency kits are validated and sold at higher frequencies. This does not matter very much, since all kits come with a JEDEC setting to run 1600 initially, and everybody who knows he needs better latencies can lower them by hand to the actual achievable latency. Kits sold as 1600 are really mainly for people looking for cheap memory. Which is fine, as most reviews show little to no relevant gain from faster memory for most tasks anyways.