Following the trend of companies expanding with new series, today we're looking at the new Genesis kit from Kingston which is part of the popular HyperX series we know and love. While named Genesis, the term we've been throwing around more is HyperX Grey and that's of course due to the color of the heat spreader that's present.

Looking at the kit, you can see it doesn't carry the same flair as the higher up T1 modules that carry that massive heatsink, nor does the kit come with any active cooling like the top models. Instead we just get a nice looking heatsink that's low profile.

The particular kit we're looking at today is the PC3-12800 4GB version, but it's worth noting that an 8GB version of the kit can also be bought. Being PC3-12800 means the kit carries with it a default clock speed of 1600MHz DDR. It's funny to see companies opt for these lower speed kits lately over the higher end 1866MHz and 2133MHz DDR ones that we've seen for the few months before hand.

The lower speed does bring with it a cheaper price tag, though. Along with coming in at 1600MHz DDR, the timings are a little relaxed at 9-9-9-24-1T @ 1.65v. The timings weren't so much of a surprise, but the 1.65v default voltage was; we've seen some companies recently release 1.6v and 1.5v kits and I would've thought that we'd see the same here.

Installing the kit into our testbed, we knew that getting the default speed wouldn't be an issue and of course it wasn't. You can see our CPU-Z validation here. With that now up and running in Windows, it was time to check out the performance we could get.

Under AIDA64 we ended up with Read / Write numbers of 18,547 MB/s / 17,506 MB/s, Copy speed of 21,348 MB/s and latency of 47.5ns. Looking at SiSoftware Sandra, our memory bandwidth numbers are 21,000 MB/s for Integer and 21,000 MB/s for Float.

With the stock performance all done it was time to see how we went when it came to overclocking. Instead of messing around with the BCLK, I opted to increase the memory divider so it went to 1866MHz DDR. To my surprise the machine posted and got into Windows.

Once in Windows, though, everything got a bit wobbly and it wasn't running the best and as I went to restart I was greeted by a BSOD. So 1866MHz DDR while close, just wasn't going to happen. Back to the 1600MHz DDR divider, we went and pushed the BCLK to 107.5. We knew this wouldn't be an issue since 1866MHz DDR could get us into Windows, and of course it wasn't. You can see our CPU-Z validation here.

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Since that was working so well as expected, it was time to go back into the BIOS and see if we could become a little more aggressive with the timings. We moved to 8-8-8-24-1T @ 1.65v, but the machine wouldn't post. Before just going back to the default 9-9-9-24-1T setup, we tried 8-9-8-24-1T @ 1.65v and we got into Windows and started to benchmark with no problems. You can see our CPU-Z validation here.

Under AIDA64 we ended up with Read / Write numbers of 20,018 MB/s / 18,857 MB/s, Copy speed of 22,954 MB/s and latency of 43.2ns. Looking at SiSoftware Sandra, our memory bandwidth numbers are 23,000 MB/s for Integer and 23,000 MB/s for Float.

With us running all good at 1720MHz DDR with the tighter 8-9-8-24-1T setup, it was time to go back to the BIOS and adjust our CPU multiplier. This pushes our CPU to 4.95GHz and we end up back in Windows to see our memory performance under AIDA64 which can be seen below.

Under AIDA64 we ended up with Read / Write numbers of 21,360 MB/s / 24,277 MB/s, Copy speed of 27,426 MB/s and latency of 40.3ns. This is a nice boost in performance and you can see a great improvements in Write and Copy numbers while at the same time latency really improves.

While it would've been nice to get 1866MHz DDR out of the kit, the fact we got 1720MHz DDR and lower timings was an excellent conciliation prize. Overall, the Genesis is a good looking kit of RAM and priced at $49.99 US for the kit we have here and $99.99 US for the 8GB kit, the price falls in at the right level.

It will be interesting to see if Kingston do anything else with these new Genesis series as we see HyperX series really expand since its humble beginnings. Another great kit of RAM that won't set you back too much and will suit P67 users who don't want to mess around with clocks much or just want to have a little bit of a play. If you want to get serious, the higher end HyperX kits are a great option.