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G.Skill Ripjaws Z 2133CL9Q-16GBZH Memory Kit Review

Memory by leeghoofd @ 2012-02-02

G.Skill is one of the more prominent market leaders in the RAM department. Offering a zillion of different ram combinations in all sorts of quantities, timings, speeds and even you can pick between different heatspreader colors. With the launch of the SandyBridge-E platform, we received one of the higher end 16Gb quad channel kits, running at 2133Mhz. Timings are the following : CL9-11-10-28. Maybe you are not impressed, but remember this is a quad channel comprising of 4Gb dimms. And best of all the price isn't lethal at all. The X79 ram line is baptized RipjawsZ. The X lineup for the older Sandy Bridges has been renown for being potent overclockers. But most reviewed kits were only 2GB DIMM versions. So being a lot easier to push. Let's have a look if we can get some more juice out of these dimms.

Test Results

As usual, we start off with SuperPi 32M. Very reknown amongst benchers and a terrible good scaler with increased ram bandwith. An ideal test to show off ram potential. How extra ram speed performs in daily performance that's something else .

The time gained when going from 1333Mhz to 1600Mhz is a whopping 11secs faster in calculating Superpi32M. Going from 1600 to 2133 we gain another 9 secs. For the die hards, faster is even better. 2400mhz and beyond seems the way to go if SuperPi is your thing.

SuperPi 32M is single threaded, meaning only one core is loaded. When we run a SuperPi on all the cores (12) the differences are not that pronounced. 2 secs from 1333 to 1600Mhz. And a similar gain when running 2133Mhz. Once above the gains get very tiny, same as we saw with the Superpi32M. Only worthwhile for those that seek the best performance.

AIDA64 reveals what happens with the bandwith once we up the ram speeds. A solid boost at 1600mhz. At 2133Mhz we seem to hit a sweet spot as only the read results still seem to scale with extra speed. The Copy and Write output are similar to the far lower clocked 2133Mhz run. The below Cinebench Release 10 test scales hardly with extra bandwith, it's all about raw CPU power there.

The newer Cinebench release 11 version, gives the same outcome as the Pi and AIDA tests. Scaling till 2133Mhz, beyond it all stays sort of put.

Time for some encoding. We have tested with the 4.0 version of the X264HD encoding test. Surprise surprise, nice increase in rendered FPS till 2133Mhz. Then it all sorta comes to a halt.

We tested both Futuremarks PCMark05 and 07 edition. While the 05 still goes up with increased ram speed. The newer 07 version isn't too much impressed by the ram clocks we threw at it.

Close to no gains in 3dmark06. In fact very close to the margin of error.

Futuremarks 3DMark 11 is a ram lover. The more ram speed you give it, the higher the PhysX score will be. Great for tests, yet the final outcome isn't that spectacularly different between 1333 and 2400mhz.

Last but not least we tried a few games. Expecially FarCry 2 loves ram speed, hence why we included it in our test suite. Though nothing spectacular to watch. Better OC your GPU iso your Systems rams !

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