Samsung 2x4GB DDR3-1600 Memory Review

Samsung has sent us a 2×4 GB DDR3-1600 very low profile and low voltage memory kit to review. Samsung has been in the memory business for over 18 years and as you will see, this kit really shows their experience in the memory area.

Quick Look

Now before we move on lets take a quick look at the RAM and packaging. Remember to not judge a book by its cover.

As you can see there is nothing special about the RAM packaging and there is no fancy heat spreader to be found. Just pure unadulterated RAM. Not having heatspreaders is really not an issue since they generally give zero overclocking benefit to the end user and only adds cost to the product.

This is a very low profile kit of RAM. As can be seen in the above pictures there is no need to worry about clearance issues with today’s high end air coolers, since the the RAM sticks aren’t even as tall as the holding clips on the RAM slots! So if you cooler fits over empty ram slots it will fit over this RAM.

Features

• 30 nm Manufacturing Technology
• Very Low Profile Memory
• Samsung genuine DRAM
• Limited Lifetime Warranty

Test System & Methods

Hardware

• Intel Core i7 870 @ 3800 MHz
• Gigabyte P55A-UD4P
• Samsung RAM 2×4 GB @ 1600 11-11-11-28-1t 1.5 V
•  G.Skill Ripjaws 2×2 GB @ 1600 9-9-9-24-1t
•  Overclocked Samsung RAM 2×4 GB @ 2000MHz 9-9-9-24-1t 1.55 V
•  Corsair TX750 V2
• Windows 7  64-bit with SP1
• PNY GTX 580

Benchmarks

All benchmarks were run at default settings unless otherwise noted.

• 7 Zip
• Cinebench R10 & Cinebench R11.5
• Super Pi 1m & 32m (run on normal priority and affinity set to core 0)
• PiFast
• wPrime 32m and 1024m
• Synthetic Benchmarks – MaxxMem2 and Aida 64

7 Zip and Cinebench

Since none of the benchmarks rely very much on memory none of the result vary much from each other and all fall into the margin of error.

Super Pi & Pifast

Overall the results are exactly what you would expect to see. The results of Super Pi 1m and Pifast are varied but still fall in the margin of error. In Super Pi 32m you are able to see a nice improvement in times due to this benchmark having a strong relation to memory speed and timings. A full 13 second improvement between the stock Samsung RAM and overclocked Samsung RAM is a decent improvement given they were run at the same CPU speed.

wPrime

In wPrime there is once again nothing too out of the ordinary. The wPrime 32m benchmark consistently was slower with the G.Skill Ripjaws than with the lower rated stock Samsung RAM. This is hard to explain since the Ripjaw kit was a full 4% slower, which is just outside the margin of error. wPrime 1024m is the second highest memory intensive test of all the benchmarks and you can once again easily see the difference made by the faster speed and tighter timings on the overclocked Samsung RAM compared to it at stock speeds and timings.

Synthetic Benchmarks

There is a nice increase to be seen in MaxxMem2 by overclocking this RAM kit. 9.2 nano seconds are shaved off of the latency score and 0.97 GB/s is gained in the memory score. So for any applications that are memory intensive they will see a nice bump in performance. 

The Aida 64 benchmark returns similar results as MaxxMem2 showing the benefits of overclocking this RAM kit. For most user they will not see a real world performance increase from overclocking memory, but for anyone using a memory intensive program this kit deliveries in the overclocking department as has been seen and will be shown further in the next section.

Overclocking

Keep in mind this kit rated at 11-11-11-28-1t @ 1600 MHz stock.

That’s right folks! This little kit is able to not only able to post at 2400 MHz but was able to pass wPrime 1024m! This was with only 1.58 volts. I don’t know of any other kit on the market that will do those speeds with less than 1.6 volts. I went up to 1.65 volts, but this kit was still unable to pass Super Pi 32m. Regardless this is definitely an impressive result!

Conclusion

Well this kit was a definite treat to review. It surpassed all of my expectations. When I first received it I thought this was going to be a quick and easy review. I didn’t think this kit had much in the tank as far as overclocking potential due to its average speed and below average timings. Oh boy was I ever wrong! This kit was able to easily overclock and do so at low voltages compared to most of its other competition. Since most of the other kits on the market rated for 2000 MHz are 1.65 volts.

Throughout the overclocking process I kept saying “This has to be it, there is no way this kit can break 1800 MHz… 2000 MHz… 2200 MHz”. This kit did all that and more. Samsung has a real winner here especially since it is a 8 GB kit that overclocks like mad and costs only $62.49 on Newegg.ca. I would gladly recommend this kit to anyone looks for a budget ram, or mid-line benching ram. It gets an Overclocker Approved!

– bmwbaxter