Atomic is all about maximum power components and their ability to be tweaked to within an inch of their wafer thin life. While many readers will look at budget components such as the Kingston HyperX kit and scoff, there's a strong market for value kits. Even in enthusiast circles, tracking down memory that does the job without costing a week's pay is commonplace. It's a glorious achievement to find budget modules which overclock to the level of significantly more expensive kits. Given the significant outlay of cash when purchasing a quad-channel capable system, one may be forgiven for opting for cheaper memory.
Kingston's HyperX modules attempt to fill the budget sector . Each module is enclosed by a low profile heatsink with a blue metallic finish. They're compact enough to fit under larger CPU air coolers such as the Noctua NH-D14 without an issue.
Our tests showed that the performance of this kit isn't too shabby. PiFast and wPrime tests came close to the likes of the RipjawsZ and Evo Corsa kits. The main differentiators are latency and read transfer rate, where these modules don't fair quite as well. Given the 1600MHz rating, we're more than pleased at the result.
Overclocking didn't yield much of an improvement. The best we could manage was tightening the latencies to 8-9-8-24 1T. This helped with transfer rates and latency, but did nothing to help with benchmarks. Increasing the voltage to 1.7v failed to provide extra headroom.
Despite the lack of overclock headroom, we're very pleased with the benchmark results. It goes to show that you don't need expensive memory to keep up with the best. If only we had a local price to compare with.
