Kingston HyperX Predator RAM & Haswell at 2800MHz

Unboxing and Installation

Kingston uses blue for their Predator RAM which is quite unusual. Fortunately, our Thermaltake tower also uses blue accents and the RAM fits right in. We did however, have to exchange our Noctua flagship NH-DH14 CPU cooler for a Thermaltake Water2.0 CPU cooler because at 54mm, the Predator heatsinks are very tall and interfere with the air cooler’s installation and operation.

Take a look at Kingston DDR3 – (left) 2x8GB HyperX “Beast” at 2133MHz and (right) HyperX “Beast” at 2800MHz.  The Beast RAM is much heavier and has a much higher profile.

The usual package of 4 DIMMs are used to ship 2 DIMMs of Predator RAM. It is that high profile!

It’s easy to open the package and we get a look at the Kingston insert which contains warranty information as well as the installation guide. A “Powered by Kingston HyperX’ sticker is included for your case.

Blue doesn’t seem to go with much ….

. . . until we turn it on.

It shows up properly configured in the ECS Golden Z87 MB BIOS although there is certainly room for performance tweaking. Here is a shot of the ECS BIOS with the stock “automatic” 1600MHz settings.

Now here are the 2800MHz settings which we also used for our benching. There is a lot of room left for performance improvements through adjusting the individual settings.  Here are the factory timings: 12-14-14-32-2T.

Let’s head over to the test configuration.