Does the Kingston “Beast” 2133MHz DDR3 live up to its name?

Differences Noted with Faster RAM – 16GB HyperX “Beast” at 2133MHz versus 8GB HyperX “Blue” at 1866MHz

First of all, we did note that doubling the amount of RAM made no difference whatsoever to PC gaming.  We did not create a RAM disk as 16GB is somewhat small and Windows 7 Home Premium does not support more than that.  We did notice that multi-tasking became even easier – especially when FireFox suffered from a serious memory leak that would cripple a 4GB system.  The slightly faster RAM definitely was noticeable in the benchmarks and barely noticeable in day to day tasks with the exception of tasks that were memory intensive.

We didn’t find any differences with our older version of Photoshop 7 Elements although Office was slightly faster with the 16GB RAM versus the 8GB.  Multi-tasking was better with the higher capacity and faster RAM, but one would be hard pressed to actually notice the difference outside of the benchmark numbers.

Synthetic Memory Bandwidth benching – SiSoft’s Sandra 2013

Before we get to gaming and to the gaming charts let’s look at SiSoft’s Sandra 2013.  It is a synthetic benching suite that can accurately compare and measure memory bandwidth as an aggregate or even look specifically at Integer and Float Memory values.  Let’s first look at our Kingston Beast HyperX DDR3 using XMP Profile number 1 which is set at 2133MHz

2133MHz

Here is the BIOS shot of XMP Profile One which shows the timingLooking at the main BIOS, we can see the voltage at 2133MHz is correctly and automatically set by the XMP profile at 1.6V:

Here is Sandra’s bandwidth result with the RAM set at 2133MHz:

1600MHz

1600MHz is the default for XMP Profile number 2 which has tighter timings than Profile 1.   Here is the BIOS shot showing the timings:Notice that the voltage is down from 1.6V at 2133MHz to 1.5V at 1600MHz

Here is Sandra’s bandwidth result.  There is a pretty significant drop from DDR3 running at 2133MHz for 25.07GB/s down to 20.68GB/s at 1600MHz:

Let’s see what default settings in the BIOS at 1333MHz produce.

1333MHz

If you do nothing and never enter your BIOS to set the XMP profile, your memory speeds will be set to 1333MHz by default.

Here is the BIOS shot

Here is Sandra’s bandwidth result.  You can see that is has dropped further from 1600MHz at 20.68GB/s to 17.43GB/s at 1333MHz

Of course, this is synthetic.  Many applications do not need more than 1333MHz.  As gamers, we need to see how memory bandwidth affects gaming.

Gaming Charts

Here are the gaming charts

At 1333MHz, the HyperX Blue kept up with the 1333MHz Beast RAM.  In some cases, its slightly faster timings allowed it to marginally outperform it.  When we increased the RAM speed, we generally see a slight performance boost, depending on game.  However, there is not much difference overall between HyperX Blue at 1866MHz and the Kingston HyperX Beast at 2133MHz suggesting that our CPU at 4.5GHz has sufficient bandwidth at the lower speed.

Now we are going to take the ten benchmarks that benefited most by increasing the RAM speed and we will further overclock our Core i7 -3770K from 4.5GHz to 4.8GHz using our Beast RAM at 1333MHz default compared to running it at 2133MHz.

In all cases, the performance continues to scale with increasing CPU core speed with the faster RAM.  Probably it is obvious, but good to actually see it happening in game engines that respond to faster memory speeds.

We have been enjoying the benefits of a PC with 16GB of super-fast DDR3 and now almost take for granted the advantages that this fast HyperX Beast RAM gives us.  Let’s head over to our conclusion