Corsair Vengeance LP PC3-12800 16GB Kit Review

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We've managed to look at a few kits from Corsair already with the high performance Corsair GTX8 2400MHz DDR kit looked at alongside the slightly lower clocked Corsair Vengeance 1866MHz DDR kit. Today we're checking out another Vengeance kit in the form of the LP series, or Low Profile.

A great option for people with those massive coolers, the Vengeance LP kit is a great little series from Corsair and today we'll be checking out the PC3-12800 kit. If you've seen the Vengeance LP kit before in its Dual Channel form, you're not going to see anything too different here.

We've got a fairly basic heatsink on offer and that's really to do with the fact that the kit is of course a Low Profile one. If you wanted a heatsink that looked a little fancier or larger, you've got the option with the typical non LP Vengeance RAM that we've looked at previously.

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Moving in closer, we get a better idea of what's going on with each side of the RAM. One side has our Vengeance LP logo while the other a sticker on it that gives us the model number along with the main specifications of the RAM we're dealing with.

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Being a PC3-12800 kit means that we carry a default clock speed of 1600MHz DDR, which is nothing too crazy. It's instead one of the lower default speeds we've tested to date. Above the speed we can see the kit is of course a 16GB one and is done via four 4GB modules.

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The timing side of things is probably one of the more impressive areas on the kit as we can see from the model number that we're dealing with a CL8 kit. The exact timings coming in at 8-8-8-24-1T @ 1.5v and these are very strong timings.

Most of the time we've seen that these lower speed kits from companies come with quite relaxed CL9 timings; instead you can see here that Corsair continue to focus on the performance side of things and while the kit comes in at 1600MHz DDR, it carries with it a strong set of timings.

With our timings set up and our speed, we knew that getting up and running wasn't going to be an issue. 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 18,274 MB/s / 15,153 MB/s, Copy speed of 16,785 MB/s and latency of 51.4ns.

Looking at the AIDA64 numbers, they're kind of surprising. When looking at how they compared to the recently looked at Kingston 1600MHz DDR kit, we find across the board there's some nice improvements thanks to the more aggressive timings on offer.

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With that up and running, though, it was time to head into the BIOS and see what we could do on the overclocking side of things. Unfortunately we initially found ourselves with no real headroom with the kit running at 8-8-8-24-1T, so we decided to change the Command Rate to 2T.

Eventually we ended up and running in Windows at 1690MHz DDR at 8-8-8-24-2T which isn't a bad overclock. Considering our cheaper Kingston kit could only move to 1640MHz DDR with a CL9 setup, we can see the strong performance on tap here.

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 18,928 MB/s / 15,896 MB/s, Copy speed of 17,668 MB/s and latency of 50.0ns.

Since we had such good timings out of the box, I figured we'd head back into the BIOS and loosen them a bit to see what we could get. I figured we'd loosen them out to 9-10-9-27-2T which lines up with the 1866 MHz DDR Vengeance kit and see if we could match that speed.

We ended up in Windows with no problems at all and figured since we managed to achieve that with no dramas, we'd head back into the BIOS to see if we could move any higher. The first thing I did was move from the 2T Command Rate to 1T to see if we could get into Windows at 9-10-9-27-1T. Again we found ourselves in Windows with no problem, so after running a benchmark and making sure it was stable, we headed back out of Windows and into the BIOS.

As we mess around with the speeds, you can see the clocks we move through during the process.

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Eventually we ended up in Windows running stable at 1934MHz DDR with the timings running at 9-10-9-27-1T @ 1.65v.

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Under AIDA64 we ended up with Read / Write numbers of 19,500 MB/s / 15,559 MB/s, Copy speed of 17,741 MB/s and latency of 47.6ns.

We can see compared to the lower latency 1690MHz DDR we end up with an overall boost for the most part across the board with the best numbers being seen in Read performance and overall latency. The fact we could do this via the 1T Command Rate is what helps us keep up the strong performance numbers even though our other timings have increased.

At $149.99 US the Corsair Vengeance LP kit is one of the more expensive 1600MHz DDR kits. What you get for the money, though, is not only more aggressive timings, but more headroom when it comes to overclocking because of those more aggressive timings.

Due to the fact that we're seeing CL8 out of the box, it means we can move to a CL9 setup and give ourselves plenty of room. Compared to a kit that comes with CL9 out of the box, we don't really want to be moving to CL10 at the 1800ish MHz DDR mark.

If you're looking for a low profile kit that comes under the $150 US mark and will offer you strong performance and even stronger overclocking potential, in typical fashion the Corsair kit doesn't disappoint.

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