Corsair Vengeance Pro Review: 2x8 GB at DDR3-2400 10-12-12 1.65 V
by Ian Cutress on December 13, 2013 2:00 PM ESTI have mentioned this before in our recent memory review list, but it is worth mentioning: reviews are often just snapshots in time, and when price is such a major factor with regards to memory, if a kit happens to have a heavy discount at the time, it can impact the review conclusion. Memory can be a null point in a motherboard: stick in the cheapest 1866 C9/C10 kit you can find, enable XMP and away you go with no afterthought. More expensive kits do not always equal performance, and as our benchmarks go, higher specification kits might also have little affect (expect BF4 testing, where initial reports say it is relevant and I will add in our 2014 testbed update).
The problem Corsair has with this nice looking Vengeance Pro kit is twofold: at 2400 C10, there are very few gains over a slower 1866 C9 memory kit to be hand in terms of real world benchmarks. You can throw as many synthetic benchmarks at me as you like, I personally do not care – they do not show any direct real world benefit and are utterly pointless for memory reviews. The other problem is the price. Compared to other DDR3-2400 C10 2x8GB 1.65V memory kits:
$150: Team Xtreem LV DDR3-2400 C10 2x8GB 1.65V (on offer)
$175: G.Skill TridentX DDR3-2400 C10 2x8GB 1.65V
$177: Avexir Core ASUS Z87 DDR3-2400 C10 2x8GB 1.65V
$177: Avexir Core MSI Gaming DDR3-2400 C10 2x8GB 1.65V
$177: Avexir Core MSI OC DDR3-2400 C10 2x8GB 1.65V
$230: Corsair Vengeance Pro DDR3-2400 C10 2x8GB 1.65V
$280: Corsair Dominator Platinum DDR3-2400 C10 2x8GB 1.65V
Any reasonable gamer is going to jump on the cheaper memory kit (saving either $80 for the on offer kit or $55 for the next one down) and boost a GPU a grade or spend more on CPU cooling. While there is some amount of overclocking headroom in our sample, the loose XMP tRFC and tRC timings might be cause for concern as well. Ultimately Corsair need to price this kit around the $170-$180 mark to be in with a shout of selling volume to users building their own systems.
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Hairs_ - Saturday, December 14, 2013 - link
A crossfire test is absolutely a valid metric, and testing with older generations of cpu and gpu is something I'm wholly in favour of. My issue is that if someone was buying a dual gpu setup, they would match the cards. If they upgraded after a time differential due to a budget concern, they might mix generations. I don't see a scenario where someone is buying dual+single, however, because if you had the budget to go for a top of the line dual card, you'd be better off with two cheaper cards in crossfire.Would people still have 4 gen old setups? Absolutely! Would they mix and match cards to suit a tight budget? Sure. Would any retail buyer follow *this* pattern? Vanishingly unlikely.
Egg - Sunday, December 15, 2013 - link
Wait, why wouldn't you use a 5970 and a 5870? Sure you lose a bit on clock speeds but it's exactly the same as triple 5870 otherwise, isn't it? And you save some slots.Perhaps someone wanted to do a really expensive water cooled microATX build with 4 slots. IDK, but it doesn't sound that farfetched in practice.
I haven't done this, or CF'ed anything at all, so this is just my two cents...
Hairs_ - Sunday, December 15, 2013 - link
Why? Like I said, there's no physical reason why you *couldn't*, but people use crossfire/sli for the same reason people overclock: to get top-line performance out of a smaller budget. The other use scenario is someone who wants bragging rights and doesn't care about the cost.For the primary, that user is not going to pay for a top line dual card when they could get similar numbers from two lower end cards. For the secondary use case, if money is no object (which it would have to be), why wouldn't you have bought two 5970's?
This example doesn't fit into any consumer behavior, so I have no idea why it would be used as a test.
Giffs - Friday, December 13, 2013 - link
No idea if there is any point in using winrar 4.2But there is winrar 5.01 why not using the latest version? wouldn't it bring improvements on the software side and more accurate results of some sorte??
sinPiEqualsZero - Saturday, December 14, 2013 - link
Thanks for the writeup. I'm shopping for memory and am happy I got to read this first.Also, I noticed an issue: " More expensive kits do not always equal performance, and as our benchmarks go, higher specification kits might also have little affect" should be effect with an e.
Thanks, Ian!
Hairs_ - Saturday, December 14, 2013 - link
There's no "might" about it. High spec kits make NO difference.Hairs_ - Saturday, December 14, 2013 - link
I wonder how it is that the entirely arbitrary "Performance Index" which was devised for memory testing isn't at all borne out by real-world data. Yet the bald statement"From the data in our memory overview, it was clear that any kit with a performance index of less than 200 was going to have issues on certain benchmarks. The Corsair kit has a PI of 240, which is at the higher end of the spectrum."
is still maintained.
There are no facts to back this statement up, as proved in the tests. Are Anandtech reviews going to continue to ignore factual data in favour of preconceived assumptions? I hope not.
Ytterbium - Saturday, December 14, 2013 - link
Explicit Finite Difference, in this graph you have 1333 C9 mid pack and 1866 C9 at bottom, I assume this is typo?Hairs_ - Saturday, December 14, 2013 - link
if you look at all the graphs, the results aren't consistent at all. The kit that top one graph can be bottom of the next. Furthermore, the differences between top and bottom scoring kits is negligible in almost all tests, so many of the differences in rank can be due to statistical variance rather than a meaningfully measured performance difference.E.g. in many tests, the fastest kit in terms of headline mhz (3ghz) is beaten by theoretically slower stuff.
Gen-An - Saturday, December 14, 2013 - link
I wonder if Corsair has purposely set out to make this kit look bad. Every single review I've seen of the Vengeance Pro 2x8GB 2400C10 kit has been Ver4.21, which uses Samsung 4Gbit B-die ICs and are infamous for not being able to clock much higher than about DDR3-2500 or so. I have four sticks of these and they are Ver5.29 using Hynix 4Gbit MFR and I've done Super Pi 32M runs at DDR3-3000 12-15-15-45 and they are rock solid at DDR3-2666 11-13-13.