Corsair Vengeance PC3-15000 16GB Kit Review

Don't need the insane speeds of the Dominator GTX series? Well then, maybe this PC3-15000 Vengeance it is just what you're after!

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Manufacturer: Corsair
3 minutes & 55 seconds read time
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The other day we looked at the new Corsair Dominator GTX8 8GB kit and we found ourselves really impressed with what Corsair was offering us. The problem with this kit is that to achieve 2400MHz DDR, you need a CPU that's able to offer that kind of speed and as we mentioned in that review, out of the three 3960X CPUs we had, only one could achieve this speed with the other two maxing out around the 2300MHz DDR area.

The Dominator GTX8 kit is also a really high end one; the massive amount of speed comes at the cost of only having a total of 8GB. While plenty for most, the introduction of Quad Channel will bring with it 16GB as the standard amount of RAM for most people. Also being part of the GTX line means that it's got a higher cost and is of course only on a limited run.

So if you're after a bit more memory, but you're not so worried about the speed, then we might have the kit for you today in the form of the PC3-15000 Vengeance kit - a series we saw launch earlier in the year.

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If we look at the kit, we're for the most part not seeing anything out of the ordinary. The overall look is near identical to the that of the Corsair Vengeance Series PC3-12800 8GB Kit we looked at earlier in the year with the main difference being that this kit here uses the red heatsink instead of the black one. We can also see that the current line also offers us a black PCB instead of the green. It's only a small change, but to be honest, the black looks so much cleaner.

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Checking out both sides of the modules, we can see we've got the Vengeance labelling on one side while if we look at the other we've got all the main details in regards to the kit. Moving in closer, we get a better idea of what exactly we're dealing with here today.

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We can see that we're dealing with a 16GB kit in the form of four 4GB modules. As for the speed, as you might've guessed from the PC3-15000 labelling, we're dealing with a 1866MHz DDR kit.

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On the timing side of things you can see it's a CL9 kit with the exact timings coming in at 9-10-9-27 at just a low 1.5v. Getting up and running at these speeds using a 1T command rate wasn't an issue as you can see below.

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On the overclocking side of things we didn't have much luck; we could boot around the 1900MHz DDR mark with a 2T command rate. Since it wasn't much of an overclock, I figured we'd boost the voltage to 1.6v and see if we could tighten up the timings a bit.

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At the same time, we pushed our CPU clock up to 4.7GHz to see just what kind of performance we could get out of the RAM here today. For comparisons sake you'll also see we've got our 1600MHz DDR kit as a baseline alongside the GTX8 kit we looked at the other day running at 2450MHz DDR.

Looking at the performance of the kit under our RAM benchmarks on the next column, it pretty much lines up with what you'd expect and you can see under SiSoft Sandra the difference in performance as we move up in speed. Under that benchmark we can also see the slight boost in performance that's on offer from the tighter timings.

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The Corsair Vengeance kit really stands out today and for all the right reasons. Because the kit comes in lower clocked than some of the other kits we've already looked at, the pricing on the kit is amazing at $159.99 US. Considering we're dealing with a 16GB kit as well, this is really impressive.

The introduction of Quad Channel brings with it an increased cost in memory price as we see ourselves move to kits that of course carry with it four modules instead of the two we've been used to buying for the last twelve months. Fortunately, memory pricing continues to be pretty attractive and 16GB of DDR3 memory at just over $150 US is great.

There's going to be three kinds of groups when it comes to buying RAM; you've got the people who want to get 16GB and don't want to bust the bank. Those people will be looking at 1600MHz DDR and 1866MHz DDR kits like the ones we're looking at today.

Outside of that you've got the people who are going to want something that offers us a bit more speed. This is ultimately where we'll see the 2133MHz DDR memory market come in. Depending on what you want to spend will determine the CL rating on the kit, but you've honestly got some good options when it comes to speed.

Finally, you've got the people who just want to have the fastest RAM around. That's where kits like the GTX8 come in. People who are benchmarking and want to get the most performance out of their system will no doubt opt for the higher speed kits.

The Corsair Vengeance kit we have here today, though, just sits at the perfect point for people who want a good amount of RAM, want something just a little faster than 1600MHz DDR while at the same time don't want to bust the bank account wide open.

Corsair are one of the better companies when it comes to making a kit for every budget and having a look at the Vengeance series today that hits around that $150 US price point and the Dominator GTX8 kit that sits a fair bit higher, we can see there's a kit for every user and budget.

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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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