Patriot Viper Xtreme 5 DDR5-7600 48GB Dual-Channel Memory Kit Review

TweakTown's Rating: 99%

The Bottom Line

Even removing points for the lack of RGB, Patriot and its Viper Xtreme 5 7600MHz CAS36 DDR5 delivers in all other aspects with some of the most affordable, stylish, and overclockable DDR5 in the game.

Pros

• + New
• + Tight timings
• + Performance
• + Overclockability
• + Lower cost

Cons

• - No RGB
• - Red may clash with some themes

Should you buy it?

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Introduction, Specifications, and Pricing

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If Patriot is not on your radar when grabbing a new set of DDR4 or DDR5, you need to get out from under that rock, as you are seriously missing out. With everything we have seen from them recently, not only do you get things like amazing performance and styling, but you also get RAM that has been fully programmed for compatibility across many systems, but bar none, they have been the most consistent throughout the time we have been looking at DDR5. By that, we mean that there has not been a single offering that we would not recommend. It just comes down to what speed, density, and style you are looking for.

While RGB is a huge seller in this market, Patriot went a different way. While leaving what many would call a diffuser, this time around, it is a stylish addition with a pop of color. While this does not harm the branding, as it takes the new addition from the color of their logo, it is built with the intention of not using more power to drive the lighting, which typically means you can overclock the kit a bit better. Also, it offers the ability to use less power while used in the typical fashion. While this may not be the perfect solution for every system, from what we have gathered, you may want to get over any clash the new red highlight offers because Patriot keeps to what they do best and has ensured performance comes first, with the extras as icing on the cake.

In our hands today is a set of Viper Extreme 5, non-RGB, yet they still keep the same shape as the 8000MHz and 7600MHz Xtreme 5 RGB, but rather than a white diffuser, there is a solid red plastic "diffuser" found on these newer kits. As you are about to see, not only do they stand up to our testing, they outright slay the competition. Even though we have just seen a speedy kit essentially fail at being a fast kit of DDR5, this is not one of those instances. Patriot sticks to their guns and delivers us plenty of performance while dressing up what could have been a boring design, ensuring not only that these sticks will stand out in a crowd visually, but as you will see in our charts, there is more than style within these sticks, and Patriot delivers plenty of reasons to opt for this over many others on the market.

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The Patriot Viper Xtreme 5 is known by the part number PVX548G76C36K and ships with the traditional black heat spreaders with a bright pop of red on top. The heat spreaders are aluminum, and like others from Patriot as of late, they come with easily removable heat spreaders due to the screw-together design. Also, for the extreme users of DDR5, the red portion of the RAM can be removed, allowing forced air through the spreaders.

Each stick in this kit has 24GB of density in this non-binary arrangement, which is good for users to get more bang for their buck, but realize this set is tuned to run at 7600MHz. While these are the fastest memory to grace the new charts, Patriot has good things in store with the XMP timings set to 36-48-48-84 2T. This profile requires 1.45VDIMM to function properly, but we have seen this much power used in slower kits, which did not impress us.

Dimensionally, the sticks are 133.75mm long and 6.8mm thick, but even with the fancy design of the Xtreme 5 line, they kept the height down to 47.66mm, helping them to fit under many tower cooling solutions. We also see that the weight is 48 grams per stick, slightly less than the Kingston RAM we just looked at. Extra weight does not mean much for Kingston, but in our testing of Patriot RAM, heat has never been a limiting factor unless we crank the voltages way past normal. Lastly, if you are to run into an issue with your Patriot Viper Xtreme 5 set, they are backed with a limited lifetime warranty, which will get your issues sorted with as little hassle as possible.

Now, we get to one of the better parts of the Xtreme 5 from Patriot: they are killing it on pricing. For instance, in the previous review of the Kingston DDR5, they were asking a little more than $300 for their 7200MHz memory, which failed to impress. However, Patriot takes a different tact to such a problem. They lower the price and compete with performance. That being said, to get faster sticks, with 48GB of density in the kit, Patriot is only asking $199.99 for the Viper Xtreme 5 you are about to see in fine detail. With that much money left in the coffers, you can buy a decent amount of storage, or even something like that Enermax Aquafusion ADV 360 with the savings of making an educated decision.

Patriot Viper Xtreme 5Patriot Viper Xtreme 5 RGB DDR5 RAM 32GB (2X16GB) 7600MHz CL36

	Today	Yesterday	7 days ago	30 days ago
	$154.99	$154.99	$169.99	$169.99	Buy
	$169.99	$169.99	$169.99	$169.99	Buy
* Prices last scanned on 4/19/2024 at 9:41 pm CDT - prices may not be accurate, click links above for the latest price. We may earn an affiliate commission.

Packaging and Patriot Viper Xtreme 5

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Alluding to the hotness of these newer Viper Xtreme 5 kits, Patriot shows them in the middle with swirls of smoke around them. Along with the name, logo, and type of RAM on the matte black packaging, we also get a white sticker outlined in chrome, which displays the density and speed of what is inside.

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The back shows us that this is performance RAM with XMP support and a limited lifetime warranty near the top. The middle gives us a sticker with the part number and a code to get to the Patriot site while offering windows to peek at what is inside.

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With the box out of the picture, we found a sticker floating freely inside and a pair of sticks secured in clear plastic. As many do, the plastic is made to fit the sticks while keeping the finishes in perfect condition, but it also acts as the anti-static measure for shipping so that your RAM gets no unexpected shocks that could damage them.

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Without the plastic to blur the view, we see the Viper Xtreme 5 in all its glory. We are huge fans of the simpler heat spreader design with its textured matte black finish. The most appealing change is that while not offering RGB this time, Patriot has included some bright red "diffusers" to these sticks. We also like the large logo and Xtreme 5 painted on the spreaders with white to add a secondary bit of pop to the already eye-grabbing aesthetic.

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Unlike many companies, Patriot does not change the appeal of the opposite side of their sticks. With the logo and Xtreme 5 still visible on the reverse, they added the part sticker to the lower-right corner, allowing this to happen. The part number, type, density, speed, CAS, voltage, and where it is made are listed. You may want to look up near the red portion of the heat spreaders, as this is where you will find the tiny screws that secure the spreaders to the RAM.

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Stepping back a bit to see what the Xtreme 5 would look like installed on any system, the appeal of the kit increases. We cannot get enough of this mix of matte black, snowy white, and bright red at the apex of the RAM.

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Since the central portion of the "diffusers" has a couple of angles and the edges relieved, Patriot found it best to put their brand at the bottom of the sticks when installed. Once someone sees that bright red-on-black aesthetic, it only takes a bit of focusing to see who makes them so you can get a kit all your own.

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After removing the pair of screws on the IC side of the PCB, we pulled the spreader and found nice things. The thermal tape for the ICs is not overly adhesive, and we find the PMIC cooled with a thermal pad. As you will see in the following image, Hynix H5CGD8MGBD ICs are under the hood. If you wish to remove the red portion of the kit, you can remove the screws behind it, pull it out, and resecure the spreaders without it for extreme testing.

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The Thaiphoon Burner image shows Patriot, 7600 C36, its 4800 JDEC, and Richtek as the PMIC maker. In the middle, we are reassured that the ICs are Hynix M-die, and the right column shows us the model of the SPD hub used.

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Mem TweakIt shows us that Patriot not only gets us 7600 MHz in speed but does so with a tRAS of 80 rather than over a hundred. The tRFC is also lower, while the tREFi is a tad higher than most. We see small changes in the tertiaries, but many of those matter very little compared to the ones mentioned above.

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Once installed, we still love the appeal of what Patriot provided. Not only does the name and logo on the side stand out, but the play of lights on the angles of the red "diffusers" makes them look even better than before. While the style does harken back to older Maximus Extreme board styling, we do not mind it against the all-black layout of our APEX Encore.

Test System Details

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To obtain the Intel CPU-Z screenshots, you will see directly following this image; this is the system we used to do it, as well as to get the results seen in the following pages. Thanks to Intel, be quiet!, MSI, EKWB, and Sabrent for supporting us with this venture. Detailed specifications of the system can be found below.

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After a couple of trips through the BIOS to gather information, we enabled the XMP setting and booted into Windows. We see our Viper Xtreme 5 running at 7600 MHz with 36-48-48-84 2T timings. The motherboard enabled high DRAM voltage mode and set the VDIMM to 1.45V, while our System agent pushed 1.233V, and the Memory Controller used 1.385V.

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We made some headway by starting from XMP timings and working our way down while running the Viper Xtreme 5 at 7600 MHz. We got the timings down to 34-44-44-84 2T, and they are stable like this without the need to add voltage to any of the options in BIOS.

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The other option is to look for more speed from the kit, and in our attempts, we landed at 8400 MHz, 800 more than we were told the kit could run. While doing this and enabling the XMP timings, we again saw no need for voltage adjustments. We did get this kit into Windows and tested it to be stable at 8600 MHz and into Windows with no stability at 8800 MHz, but it took a lot of VDIMM to get there.

Chad's Intel DDR5 Dual-Channel Test System Specifications

• Motherboard: ASUS Maximus Z790 APEX Encore - Buy from Amazon
• CPU: Intel Core i9 14900K - Buy from Amazon
• Cooler: EK Nucleus AIO CR360 Lux D-RGB - Buy from Amazon
• Video Card: MSI GeForce RTX 3090 Gaming Trio 24G - Buy from Amazon
• Storage: Sabrent Rocket 4 PLUS-G 4TB - Buy from Amazon
• Case: Custom Thermaltake Core P3 TG
• Power Supply: be quiet! DARK POWER PRO 12 1500W - Buy from Amazon
• OS: Microsoft Windows 11 Home - Buy from Amazon

Intel Performance

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As one would expect based on speed alone, the Viper Xtreme 5 destroyed the rest of the kits in our AIDA 64 read performance chart. Patriot starts with a 7250 MB/s lead over Corsair with the 115.711 MB/s the XMP profile delivered. We lost ground with tighter timings this time, but we could push the kit up to 127,344 MB/s for a boost of 11,623 MB/s over XMP.

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The write performance in AIDA64 tells a similar story. Patriot hits the chart 5008 MB/s faster than Corsair, giving us 97,842 MB/s of XMP performance. Again, we did lose a little ground with tight timings, but pushing the Xtreme 5 to 8400 MHz gave us an additional 5472 MB/s of performance simply by changing the speed in BIOS.

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In the copy performance chart, we see the same as before. 5900 MB/s more than the next player in line is where the 102,272 MB/s XMP result lands in this chart. Our loss with tighter timings is expected, but we still enjoy adding 7206 MB/s for free, landing this set of Patriots at 109.478 Mb/s at 8400 MHz.

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Latency from Patriot is also chart-topping. Fresh out of the box, we saw 61.6ns, which is a fair bit better than the next kit in line. Using the reduced timings increased latency over the XMP results, but we got our first kit under 60ns with these Patriots, while at 8400 MHz, we got 59.6ns

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Super Pi is a metric in which reduced timings show promise as if the three-second improvement over others at four minutes and forty-one point four seconds for the XMP profile. We gained another couple of seconds by dropping the timings, but the best result is still at 8400 MHz, nearly four seconds faster than XMP.

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On our previous build, speed did not indicate topping the chart in PCMark testing. However, this time, we find the XMP and 8400 MHz results at the top of the chart again. Reducing the timings hurt the score, but it is just a few points behind the Corsair.

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Regarding compression, 7-Zip seems to have no issue with the Patriot Viper Xtreme 5. XMP results are over three seconds faster than Corsair. If you want to tinker, we gained half a second or so, tightening the timings, but got over four seconds of our time back with increased speed.

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Even with transcoding, Patriot again tops the chart. While the advantage over others is not huge, we can see that XMP is almost a second faster than the next in line, and when reducing the timings, we got the same result. 8400 MHz has an advantage over XMP, but it is only a second and a half faster to complete the task.

Final Thoughts

You haven't been paying attention if you haven't gathered by this point that we adore what Patriot is doing. Not only are they willing to step outside the box and deliver non-RGB RAM, but they do so with all the flavor and appeal you want. They could have just wrapped the top of these sticks with aluminum as all other non-RGB kits do, but instead, they went out on a limb, and we are behind what they did here. Those wanting all of the love of what the higher density non-binary kits have to offer and want it with a bit of headroom to fool around trying your hand at overclocking will not be disappointed in the Viper Xtreme 5. They are honestly superior to anything we have tried on the new test bed thus far.

Beyond the looks and flexibility, we have chart-topping performance in every metric. While Patriot has the advantage of speed, they also have the advantage of tightly screening the sticks for the best timings in the game. Beyond all that testing that goes into this RAM before you get it, you also receive them with three tightly screened XMP profiles, allowing users to have options depending on the situation, which most others don't look at. The only other time we saw similar was with a Corsair set, but they programmed the second profile with an overclock.

We also love the simplicity of the overclocking. With our APEX Encore, we pushed this kit further than any other, with very little needed from the consumer. We were either changing the numbers in the timings portion of the BIOS or adjusting the speed. We made no other changes to the system and were greeted with some amazing results. We could get more from this kit, but the VDIMM needed was over 1.55V, which we do not advise everyone to do without proper planning. However, it shows how good the ICs that Patriot is using are compared to what we have seen from others on the market.

There is one last thing to consider, and that is the cost. Looking at something like what Kingston just delivered, we have to fork out a tad more than $300 to get them. While they have RGB illumination, the performance is poor, and they are at the upper end of the price spectrum. At the opposite end are Patriot and the Viper Xtreme 5 7600 MHz CAS 36 option. At only $199.99, you can do what we have, and not only get the performance RAM should deliver, but you get them with stunning visual appeal and plenty of room to tinker. No matter where you look, with the current 48GB options of 7600 MHz RAM on the market, Patriot comes out on top with the lowest price and the most amazing bang for the buck, which is why we highly recommend Patriot for your next set of RAM.