AMD Launches Gamer Series Memory

Today, AMD is announcing the launch of an expansion to their memory line – the Gamer Series of Radeon memory. The new kits are very similar to the previous series and come outfitted with low profile aluminum heatsinks and black PCB.

When you buy the Gamer Series kit, you also get AMD’s top RAMDisk software, which lets you use up to 64 GB of memory for a RAMDisk.

AMD first announced their incursion into the memory market back in November of 2011, with speeds up to DDR3-1866.

Bobnova actually reviewed a 2×4 G Entertainment Edition DDR3-1600 kit and it performed pretty well, especially at its price point.  Gamer Series is rated faster than the previous AMD kits.

The Gamer Series comes in a 16 GB (4×4 GB) kit and are rated for 1.65 V, DDR3-2133 and CL10. They also come equipped with AMD’s AMP and Intel’s XMP profiles. As mentioned, they come with 64 GB Radeon RAMDisk software. We’ll get to that in a little bit. The real question is: Why did they choose to put a Tomb Raider screenshot and title in this slide?

The obvious question is: Who is the OEM for the Gamer Series memory? The answer is there are two: “DataRam is AMD’s North American Partner for AMD Memory, while SMI is AMD’s partner outside of North America.”

To get a little more detail, I asked who made the specific ICs and this was their response:

“AMD often require custom screening on ICs in order to ensure compatibility on both Intel & AMD platforms, this is particularly important for our high end product. That is why you will find AMD marking on ICs, denoting its unique custom qualities. AMD partnership with IC vendors is under NDA, hence we cannot disclose specifics, however we can state that it is limited to only leading manufacturers in the industry, and respective leaders in alphabetic order are: Hynix, Micron & Samsung.”

They didn’t elaborate too much on the enhanced AMP profiles (such as how they can get this kit to run CL 7…), but the Gamer series comes with AMP profiles to add flexibility and ease to your memory clocking experience on AMD platforms.

Now we get to the performance slides. APUs are heavily dependent on memory speed, and with faster memory comes higher FPS. When compared to the 8 GB DDR3-1600 Entertainment Series kit you can see healthy gains going to Gamer Series speed memory.

The new RAMDisk software allows faster boot up and shutdown over the previous version.

So AMD has given a decent value-add with their memory, an $18.99 value, but it is admittedly just a little odd giving people 64 GB RAMDisk software when you only have 16 GB of RAM.

Before looking at the next slide, you should know the specs – these tests were run on a system I’m sure brought out the best results, but it’s a couple generations old at this point: an Intel i7 930, ASUS P6TD Motherboard with 24 GB DDR3-1900 vs. DDR3-1066. So while you see massive gains in this triple-channel configuration, you probably won’t see quite this kind of difference in your average dual-channel system.

A 4×4 GB DDR3-2133 CL10 AMD Gamer Series memory kit will run you $154.99 and they’re available on Newegg starting today, which is right where it should be based on the current memory market. There’s no lack of competition at the price point, but if you’re looking for a low profile kit with these specs, the included RAMDisk addition might just make it worth considering.

– Jeremy Vaughan (hokiealumnus)