G.Skill RipjawsZ PC3-19200 16GB Kit Review

G.Skill show off a 2400MHz DDR 16GB kit. We see what it's all about and if it's got some headroom to go even further.

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Manufacturer: G.Skill
5 minutes & 46 seconds read time
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I'd say that we're slowly working our way through all the X79 gear that has made its way into our office here, but there's nothing slow about the way we're moving through it, or slow about the gear itself for that matter. The latest piece of X79 kit comes in the form of another Quad Channel memory kit from G.Skill.

The PC3-19200 kit we've got here from G.Skill kind of completes the circle of RAM from the company. Originally at launch we found ourselves looking at a 16GB PC3-17000 kit, after that we checked out something a little lower end and cheaper in the form of a 16GB PC3-14900 kit.

Today we kick it up a couple of notches with the PC3-19200 RipjawsZ kit from G.Skill and before we get into the kit, I want to check out the new package that's present that we're seeing with some of the higher end G.Skill kits.

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While we've seen the little brown boxes in the past along with the blister packs, the new box is a fair bit bigger with two of those more traditional brown boxes that we've seen before.

Of course, the reason for the bigger box is that inside we've got two sets of fans included in the bundle. Originally when we first got our PC3-17000 kit, we received the four modules in a single brown box with a single RAM cooling fan included in the bundle.

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A single fan isn't that helpful when you've got to spread the modules across each side of the CPU, so it's nice to see that G.Skill have opted to include a pair of the coolers in the package verses a single one, or no cooler at all.

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With that part of the bundle / package out the way, let's take a closer look at the modules themselves. Looking below, you're not going to see anything too out of the ordinary when it comes to the RipjawsZ kit with the same black heatsink that we saw on the PC3-17000 kit.

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We've also got that black PCB present which always make the G.Skill kit look super sexy in your system. Moving in closer to the kit, we can see that RipjawsZ logo on one side while the other side we've got our main specifications.

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Looking closer again, we can see exactly what's going on with the kit. As we've already mentioned a few times, we're dealing with a PC3-19200 kit which translates into a massive 2400MHz DDR which continues to be the highest out of the box speed we're seeing from companies at the moment for Quad Channel kits.

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On the timings side of things, they're pretty relaxed at 11-11-11-31-1T @ 1.65v which is currently the most relaxed 2400MHz DDR kit we've seen to date with the other kits we've looked at coming in at CL10.

Considering we've dealt with slightly more aggressive timings at 2400MHz DDR, we knew that getting the G.Skill kit up and running wasn't going to be a problem. 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 19,986 MB/s / 15,058 MB/s, Copy speed of 17,588 MB/s and latency of 44.8ns.

Looking at the AIDA numbers. they line up with what we'd expect. Heading back into the BIOS, we wanted to see if we could get the more aggressive timings that we get on the more expensive 2400MHz DDR kit from G.Skill. Going into the BIOS, we set the timings to 9-11-10-28-2T and pushed our voltage up to 1.7v.

We ended up running with no dramas, so we figured since that was working fine we'd head back into the BIOS and push the Command Rate to 1T. We found ourselves back in Windows again 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 20,543 MB/s / 15,057 MB/s, Copy speed of 17,770 MB/s and latency of 42.9ns.

Compared to the CL11 setup, you can see there's not a huge difference in bandwidth with a slight boost in Read numbers; the biggest difference comes in the latency which sees a nice little improvement.

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Moving back out to the default CL11 timings, we figured we'd find out what kind of overclock we could get with the default timings again. Back in the BIOS we found ourselves messing around a bit and we ended up in Windows at 2530MHz DDR. 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 20,873 MB/s / 15,920 MB/s, Copy speed of 18,074 MB/s and latency of 43.0ns.

You can see across the board there's a nice little boost in performance, but compared to the CL9 setup at 2400MHz DDR, the latency performance is really similar. Since that worked so well, though, I'd figure we'd go back into the BIOS and just try and tighten up the timings a little more.

We ended up in Windows again at 2532MHz DDR with the timings of 10-11-10-31-1T. 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 21,339 MB/s / 15,934 MB/s, Copy speed of 18,569 MB/s and latency of 41.4ns.

Overall, you can see we've got a bit of a boost in performance in both the Read area and the Copy speed. The latency is again one of the biggest areas we see the improvement with it coming in under the CL9 2400MHz DDR setup.

Finally, after spending hours in the BIOS and testing the kit in many different ways, we'll head into the BIOS one more time and crank up our CPU speed to get some more bandwidth numbers before we finish everything off. We pushed our CPU multiplier up to 45x and with the BCLK coming in at 105.5; that pushed our CPU to 4748MHz.

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Looking above, you can see under AIDA64 we ended up with Read / Write numbers of 23,400 MB/s / 18,329 MB/s, Copy speed of 20,949 MB/s and latency of 39.6ns.

No surprise that this of course gives us the best performance and you can see across the board there's some really nice performance being seen and the gains are seen in every aspect of the AIDA64 tests.

At $324.99 US the G.Skill RipjawsZ PC3-19200 CL11 kit isn't cheap; it does line up with other 2400MHz DDR 16GB kits, though, so if you're after that kind of speed, you shouldn't be shocked with the price. Overclocking potential is really strong on this kit, but of course that can always change from kit to kit.

Probably one of the most important things we can take away from the kit, though, is the fact that to date it's the highest speed kit we've tested coming in at 2535MHz DDR. I figured the wall on our memory controller was around 2470MHz DDR, but we know today that isn't true.

This of course brings us onto one of the biggest issues with 2400MHz DDR memory. Without a strong memory controller built into your CPU, the default speeds might not be reached; this isn't a problem with G.Skill, it's something that is going to be a problem for anyone who is looking for ultra-high speed RAM.

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In the end, this is just a really nice kit of RAM, and based on the size of the review here it comes as no surprise that we're really impressed with what G.Skill is offering us. If you're after some serious speed, the results really speak for themselves here.

The only problem is because the Rampage IV Extreme is a board that supports four video cards, you can't actually use the top slot. Instead we had to use the third slot which is also a x16 wired one. Most boards don't have a PCIe x16 slot that hugs the RAM so closely, though, as most only support three dual slot video cards. None the less, it's something worth knowing and not really the fault of anyone in particular, simply the cost of wanting a Quad SLI / CrossFireX setup.

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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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