Gskill RipjawsX 4GB 17000 CL9D-4GBXMD Review

Memory by leeghoofd @ 2011-02-25

Gskill introduced their magical Flare ram kit at the same time as the release of AMD's Hexacore Thuban CPU. By using PSC ICs, better known as powerchips, achieving new ram speed heights on the AMD 890 platform. On the AMD front it has been quite calm lately, though Intel launched their new "ahum" mainstream Sandy Bridge CPU early this year. With a bucketload of available brand new ram dividers on the P67 motherboards, you can squeeze every drop of performance out this platform. When exploring the Sandy architecture we noticed a sweetspot of price/performance around the 1600mhz ram speed mark. Though for the enthousiasts every Mhz counts. Today we test the brand new 4gb 2133Mhz CL9 kit.  Quite an interesting kit as it's not the high end CL 7 kit, and thus less pricey. Though could we achieve similar speeds ?

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Test setup and methodology

Since this ram kit is designed for the Sandy Bridge platform, no time too loose then. Motherboard on duty is Asus P67 Sabretooth. A quick run over on the system specs :

Mobo : Asus P67 Sabretooth ( Bios 1253 )

CPU : Intel I7 2600K CPU @ 4500mhz,  kindly provided by Tones PC shop

RAM : Gskill PC17000CL9D 4GBXMD and GSkill Flare 16800CL7 4GB

GPU : Asus GTX 480, Nvidia WHQL 266.58 drivers

PSU : Corsair HX1000

Dimastech Benchtable

We will wade through our usual benchmarks and test, to see how these rams perform. I stuck to the 2133Mhz speeds and hunted for more performance.  For more ram tests, regarding dividers and timings, it's best to have a look at the different dividers tested in the [M] Sandy Bridge review.

 

Here's a quick look at some tests that scaled nicely with added ram speed. All ram speeds operating at CL8-8-8-24 1T timings and the 2500K CPU at stock clocks :

 

 

 

 

The above tests are best case scenarios. so don't expect a world of difference in daily apps going from a 1600mhz kit to a 2133mhz one. For the enthousiast crowd, you know what to buy :) Turn the page, to see what these blue boys are made off...

 

 

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