Legit Reviews

Kingston HyperX H2O 4GB 2133MHz DDR3 CL9 Memory Kit Review

Sick looks and integrated water cooling top off this special H2O edition from Kingston with their HyperX 4GB 2133MHz kit. Legit Reviews pushes the Kingston HyperX H2O 2133Mhz memory kit in our Sandy Bridge test bench to see if there is any more juice that can be squeezed out of it and we will show you how this DDR3 memory kit stacks up to some run of the mill 1600MHz memory.

A nice feature that Kingston has with the HyperX H2O 2133MHz DDR3 memory kits is dual XMP profiles. The first profile for this kit is 2000Mhz at 9-11-9-27 timings and the second profile is at 2133Mhz also at 9-11-9-27 timings. The reason for the two profile combination is to help those that do not have unlocked processors achieve great performance while maintaining stability. Since my test bench has an unlocked Intel Core i5-2500K 'Sandy Bridge' processor I was able to utilize the faster 133Mhz profile and boot the system with no problem

Article Title: Kingston HyperX H2O 4GB 2133MHz DDR3 CL9 Memory Kit Review
Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1647/1/
Pricing At Time of Print: $129.60 shipped

I get a better performance (28.4MB/s) from my GSkill ripjaws kit, which also has a hassle-free XMP profile for 2133Mhz 9-11-9-28 and is rock stable for $62CAD

yeah, but you can't water cool them ;)

Just curious what your command rate is.

Bill ran 9-11-9-27 2T, so I am assuming the majority of the difference is from secondary timings and of course the command rate the memory is run at.

I noticed you i5 appears to be overclocked which can also affect throughput. You are also running a gigabyte board vs the Asus board I ran which might impact numbers. Given a 4% delta between your numbers and mine, I think these kits are very close but no integrated water cooling option on your kit justifies the price difference. As I said in the article lot of options out there and you are correctly pointing out one of them.

Thanks for reading my review and taking the time to comment.

Bill

Bill, could that kit run 1T timings at 2133Mhz ?

Apoptosis wrote:yeah, but you can't water cool them ;)

Just curious what your command rate is.

Bill ran 9-11-9-27 2T, so I am assuming the majority of the difference is from secondary timings and of course the command rate the memory is run at.

The command rate is 1T by default (XMP profile) and yes I can't water cool them, but since the kingstones can't really be OC'd, it doesn't really make any difference. I would also ad 1 more positive point on the behalf of the ripjaws - then run these specs @ 1.6V versus the kingstons 1.65V

I appreciate the cool looks of the kingston RAM and the performance is nice but I can't justify the price difference. The water cooling would make sense if the RAM could be OC'd to lets say 2500Mhz, running on higher voltage but like this?

I was looking at GSkill's page and they already have 2200Mhz, 2400Mhz and even 2500Mhz RAM (running @ 1.65V). I would really like to see a review of those (They probably still aren't more expensive @ those speeds than Kingston)

Bhench wrote:I noticed you i5 appears to be overclocked which can also affect throughput. You are also running a gigabyte board vs the Asus board I ran which might impact numbers. Given a 4% delta between your numbers and mine, I think these kits are very close but no integrated water cooling option on your kit justifies the price difference. As I said in the article lot of options out there and you are correctly pointing out one of them.

Thanks for reading my review and taking the time to comment.

Bill

Yes, you are right and I really liked the review, which was very correct and unbiased but as I - said above (I know you also mentioned that) - can't justify the price, which is more than double, provided that the Kingston RAM can't be OC'd

The Kingston memory can be overclocked... Neither GSkill or Kingston would be able to be overclocked in the test system that Bill is using. So, to knock the kit by saying it can't overclock isn't right.

Apoptosis wrote:The Kingston memory can be overclocked... Neither GSkill or Kingston would be able to be overclocked in the test system that Bill is using. So, to knock the kit by saying it can't overclock isn't right.

I can only base my opinion on the review. So if the kingston memory can be OC'd, than I guess the test rig wasn't apropriate, since the only real advantage of water cooling (and justification for the higher price), would be the OC capability (if high enough).

I tried the 1t timing and it improved the throughput a bit from 27.1 to 27.4 MB/s. I played around a bit more and at 1.667v I was able to get the memory stable at 7-10-8-26 1t for a throughput of 28.1 MB/s per Sandra. So as Nate correctly said, there is more legs on this kit if you are willing to go out of spec on your CPU at least on my board. I was able to get the Dominator kit from 1600 to 2132Mhz so the board does overclock pretty well. Remember all memory kits overclock differently even same series from the same vendor so your mileage may vary. Maybe a new Z68 motherboard would OC better.

The main value of this memory is that you do not have to purchase a 3rd party water cooling set up that wouldn't have near the sweet looks of this kit. If you add the cost of that into the equation the pricing is more than reasonable. Also be aware that Kingston, like G.Skill, has kits that have tested XMP profiles as high as 2333Mhz but they are not part of the H2O series.

At the end of the day, if you want integrated water cooling then this is a great kit, if you are just looking for maximum speed and to run on air there are other options out there from Kingston and others at varying price points. Personally I am not convinced you need to water cool memory and that if you do, that it will have any affect on maximum overclock but your point is valid.

sbohdan wrote:

Apoptosis wrote:The Kingston memory can be overclocked... Neither GSkill or Kingston would be able to be overclocked in the test system that Bill is using. So, to knock the kit by saying it can't overclock isn't right.

I can only base my opinion on the review. So if the kingston memory can be OC'd, than I guess the test rig wasn't apropriate, since the only real advantage of water cooling (and justification for the higher price), would be the OC capability (if high enough).

We always try to test with the latest processors and test systems! Anyone buying a new platform these days is going Sandy Bridge!