Patriot G2 Series PC3-10666 32GB Kit Review

Because you can never have too much memory, Patriot releases a 32GB kit for the P67 / Z68 platform under the G2 Series.

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Manufacturer: Patriot Memory
4 minutes & 42 seconds read time
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Thirty Two Gigabytes of Memory. That's a hell of a lot of RAM and the largest kit we've seen to date with the previous one coming from Kingston weighing in at 24GB. As for the Z68 / P67 platform, the largest kit we've seen to date is a 16GB one from G.Skill.

As a user of 24GB of RAM myself, I can see the use in such a large amount of memory for anything from editing High Definition video personally, to people who want to use VMware. Up until now, though, we really only saw companies offer 16BG kits and if you wanted to make the move to a Z68 platform, massive memory amount options were limited.

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That was 'till today. The Patriot kit we're looking at today is a part of the G2 Series or Gamer 2 Series and to be honest, while probably not the first market people think of when it comes to the need for huge amounts of RAM, if you've got the money to blow, the chances are you want to get as much RAM as possible.

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Coming in the form of four 8GB modules, we've got a default speed of 1333MHz DDR which means it of course sits a little lower on the speed spectrum when compared to other kits we've looked at.

Getting a bit more specific, the 1333MHz DDR modules carry a 9-9-9-24 setup at a low 1.5v. From a speed perspective, the 32GB G2 kit doesn't stand out as much as some previous kits we've looked at, but we're hoping that the low 1.5v requirement will give us a little bit of head room.

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When it came to the CAS rating, we didn't know what it was officially supposed to be, so we just went for 1T. Fortunately, it fired up fine and we ended up in Windows with no issues. You can see our CPU-Z validation here. 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 16,202 MB/s / 17,036 MB/s, Copy speed of 18,010 MB/s and latency of 52.6ns.

As far as the raw numbers go, they're pretty much where we'd expect them to be, coming in slower than kits that of course come in at a much higher speed. So you'd be better off with a high speed kit? Well, while high speed kits of course have their use, you want to find that sweet spot for you between the amount of RAM you have and the speed it runs at.

So why not go into the BIOS and see what we can do? Well, to be honest, I knew before I even did my first set of tests the kit would run at 1600MHz DDR, because when I installed the kit into my testbed, I accidently forgot to drop the memory divider down to 1333MHz DDR and of course to my surprise it posted with some pretty relaxed timings. I figured I'd worry about that a little later, though, and first just see what we can do at stock.

Into the BIOS again, though, we moved to 1600MHz DDR, moved the voltage to 1.65v and just changed our CAS rating to 2T while leaving the other timings at the default 9-9-9-24.

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Tighter than the timings that the board initially booted up at, they sat around 9-11-10-27; I found myself shocked to be up and running in Windows with no troubles again. You can see our CPU-Z validation here. 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 17,671 MB/s / 17,514 MB/s, Copy speed of 20,162 MB/s and latency of 47.9ns.

Since I was doing so much better with overclocking than I thought, I went back into the BIOS and decided to push the memory divider up again to 1866MHz DDR. With no intention of it working, I was shocked to see the machine post. Unfortunately the excitement was short lived as we climbed into the Windows load screen and were greeted by a BSOD.

Surprised with the fact that our 1333MHz DDR kit was posting at 1866MHz DDR and was only falling over at the point of getting into Windows, I figured it was time to just go back into the BIOS again and loosen the timings a little. 10-10-10-27-2T is the loosest timings I will use and figured it was worth giving the kit a chance.

Of course, it came as no surprise that the machine booted as it did with lower timings. What was particularly surprising was the fact that we got into Windows with no issues. You can see our CPU-Z validation here. Up and running in Windows, it was time to check out the performance we could get.

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Under AIDA64 we ended up with Read / Write numbers of 19,409 MB/s / 17,919 MB/s, Copy speed of 21,060 MB/s and latency of 44.7ns.

You can see we're really starting to move up in speed as we've gone from a 16k / 17k MB/s score to 19k / 18k MB/s score. The next move up from 1866MHz DDR and that just wasn't going to happen. At this point, though, we'd normally head back into the BIOS and push our CPU divider up to see just what kind of performance we're able to get out of the kit when we crank up our CPU speed.

Instead of just going for the multi change, I figured we'd see how a bit of BCLK fun went. We ended up in Windows with a 107.3 BCLK with the 1866MHz DDR divider. This resulted in our 32GB of RAM running at 2003MHz DDR at 10-10-10-24-1T @ 1.65v and our CPU running at 5.255GHz.

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As you can see above, this resulted in some really strong performance and a big boost in performance to what we'd seen so far out of the kit. Under AIDA64 we ended up with Read / Write numbers of 23,053 MB/s / 26,095 MB/s, Copy speed of 26,492 MB/s and latency of 38.6ns.

This is just some amazing performance and so much more than we expected out of the kit considering we're dealing with 8GB modules. While a part of the "Gamer 2" series, I'm not sure how many Gamers are going to be going out and rushing to buy this kit, because while we don't have a price yet, we're sure a decent wad of cash is going to need to be thrown down to use the kit we have here today.

This huge amount of memory excels in the most intensive of tasks, though, like High Definition Video Editing and the use of multiple VM windows. If you've got the cash to spend, though, it's going to be a simply awesome kit to have installed in your system. You ultimately can never have too much RAM.

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Shawn takes care of all of our video card reviews. From 2009, Shawn is also taking care of our memory reviews, and from May 2011, Shawn also takes care of our CPU, chipset and motherboard reviews. As of December 2011, Shawn is based out of Taipei, Taiwan.

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