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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 ?

Conclusion :

Looking at the above bold claim. It perfectly wraps it up here : Low Voltage ( 1.5Vdimm vs 1.65 ), Ultimate bandwith and performance. And this all at an affordable price. Okay cashing 105 euros out for just a 4GB kit might sound silly as a 4GB 1600Mhz CL9 will set you back for about 45 euros. However similar specced kits from other competitors retail 10-15% higher. For gamers and daily users a 1600Mhz kit might be more than sufficient. Yet for those that want to max out their systems potential (without Bclock overclocking) by just using the available RAM dividers, these 2133Mhz Gskills kits deserve to be on ya wanted list !

Some arguments in favour of the Gskill kit tested today :

The CL9D-4GBXMD being one of the cheapest 4Gb 2133 CL9 on the market. Don't forget it includes the Turbulence II RAM Cooling unit. Secondly the tweaking potential is pretty huge for benchers. Either you like a challenge and opt for a lower specced kit and try to squeeze the last drop out of it. Or you just cash out and go straight for the high end kit. The latter probably easily retailing over 140-150 euros.

On Sandy Bridge, these powerchip based dimms are a pleasure to work with. The mighty and slightly better performing Hypers needing far more volts to stabilise. +In fact far too much volts in fact for 24/7 operations. Maybe them voltage demands can be lowered in the future, once the bios engineers sort out some details. Till now however, your Sandy Bridge rig is best bundled with a Powerchip based RAM kit, for a hassle free install and operation.

With the new RipJawsX lineup, Gskill pulled it off again. Covering all available ram speeds and timings demands. Some versions being bundled with their own proper ram cooling unit. It's very hard not to find ya match !

Pros :

Optimised for the Sandy Bridge platform (1.5Volts)

Lots of tweaking potential

RAM cooler included

Affordable price for such a high speed kit

Cons :

The ram cooler with a 3 pin Molex please !

Due to its low retail price and good overclockability the Gskill 17000CL9D-4GBXMD kit gets the Value award.

Edit 01/07/2011 : A performance award is granted too now, as we had the opportunity to test out some more kits (sadly not all review samples)

A big thanks to the following person, without whom this review would never have been possible :

Mia and Frank from Gskill for the RipjawsX and the 4gb Flare kit

Rogier from Asus for the P67 Sabretooth motherboard

Manu from Tones for the retail I7 2600K CPU

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