The memory tested today, while exhibiting attributes innate to the Hyper-X series, also maintains the cost consciousness which makes Kingston an industry leader. Unfortunately for many Enthusiasts, 2048MB-kits are most often narrowly associated with Server, or Large 3D applications. What I hope to communicate today, beyond this memory's performance potential, is that the evolution of the modern PC is perfectly complimented by a kit of this size.

The Hyper-X3200 modules run at a latency of CAS 2.5 3-3-6. To manufacture extremely low latency modules of this size would have been far too costly. A cost Kingston is unwilling to pass on to the consumer. Hyper-X modules most definitely represent high performance, regardless of kit size. As you will see in this review, this particular kit performs as if it were a whole other memory, which was the inspiration for my title.

I've chosen the Asus P4C800E-Deluxe motherboard as our test bed, largely because it's the only 875-chipset based motherboard I own (please send boards Asus, Abit) and its MCH (Memory Controller Hub) is capable of reaching very high front side bus speeds. The Canterwood chipset is an able overclocker and will make an excellent catalyst for our processor, the largely misunderstood Socket-478 Prescott used in this test.




Our test system today, will include the Asus P4C800E-Deluxe (Beta BIOS ver.1017), Socket-478 Prescott 3.0E (SL79L Philippine), and a Sapphire X800Pro. The system is water-cooled, via the Cool-Cases CC-Magic (CPU-kuhler), and Danger Den Maze-4 watercooling the R420 GPU. The CPU runs completely stable up to 240FSB (1:1) under Default Vcore (1.365V ~ 1.475V via D-VID), and has been overclocked to 4010MHz (267FSB), although the system has not been completely 3DMark stable above 3.9GHz (yet). I chose an 875-chipset motherboard for its versatility in overclocking, specifically its high FSB limit. Our 2048MB pair of Kingston Hyper-X sports the usual blue anodized aluminum heat spreaders, which give Hyper-X its attractive trademark look. The lightweight aluminum seems much more capable of dissipating heat then the atypical "Gold" heat spreaders found on other brands.




Memory kits of this size are not strictly for Servers, CAD/CAM, or other such graphic intense applications. Your PC works on a memory hierarchy, after the L1, L2 caches are exhausted, and your physical RAM depleted, it's the system's pagefile allocated to your hard drive by the operating system which handles the excess. The pagefile, Swap-File or Virtual Memory as it's known, acts almost as an external cache, although that's a loose definition. When nVidia introduced its nForce chipset, one of its most ingenious attributes was given the moniker DASP (Dynamic Adaptive Speculative PreProcessor). This feature which resided in the North Bridge, identified and anticipated instructions or data which was most often shared between CPU and main memory. The information included some graphics related instructions, and DASP was also described as an L3 cache. I've been experimenting with several pagefile settings, finally disabling the pagefile all together. The performance is noticeable as the PC seems more responsive transitioning between programs. Disabling the pagefile does not necessarily enhance performance in so far improving benchmark scores. Onto the details of our test system.

Socket-478 Prescott 3.0E SL79L

Asus P4C800E-Deluxe (BIOS Beta Ver.1017)

Kingston KHX3200K2/2G

Sapphire X800Pro (Catalyst 4.7)

Maxtor Diamond Max Plus 9 (SATA150 120GB)

PCPower&Cooling TurboCool 510 Deluxe

TTGI USA TT-201T3

WindowsXP SP1