Kingston’s FURY RAM brings auto overclocking to gamers
Conclusion
There is absolutely no doubt that running RAM at a faster clock speed produces performance gains and saves time in several common tasks, especially with multi-tasking, but also including video encoding and decoding. However, for the gamer on a budget, we see that our sweet spot for gaming is indeed 2x4GB of Kingston FURY DDR3 at 1866MHz for $80. Paying $110 for the faster Beast 2133MHz does give slight advantages, but one would have to be an overclocking and performance-oriented enthusiast to pay $220 for 8GB of 2800MHz Predator premium RAM, or else work with video encoding regularly.
Kingston Predator HyperX FURY 1800MHz memory – Pros and Cons
Pros
- The Kingston HyperX FURY RAM is very fast automatically overclocked 1866 MHz DDR3 that is built for gaming, and it is a great replacement for HyperX Blu.
- FURY comes with a lifetime warranty along with Kingston’s great customer service and tech support.
- If necessary, Kingston RMAs are quick, professionally handled, and painless.
- Choice of 4 colors
Cons
- None
The Verdict
If you are a gamer with premium components who is looking for great performance without spending a fortune for memory, then the Kingston HyperX FURY DDR3 at 1866MHz is an excellent choice. We have tested 1300MHz and even 1600MHz memory, and if you are running at those speeds, overclocking or upgrading may be in order if you have an Ivy Bridge platform, or newer. For Haswell platform Core i7, 1866MHz to 2133MHz seems to be the sweet spot for bang-for-buck gaming performance, and FURY is an excellent choice for gamers and enthusiasts.
The Kingston HyperX FURY RAM is priced about the same as other manufacturer’s high-quality 1866MHz DDR3, but it is backed by Kingston who gives a lifetime warranty and excellent support. We feel it deserves ABT’s Great Value Award. We have had an opportunity to RMA a Kingston HyperX SSD recently, and we got amazing service. The turnaround was less than a week – and the Kingston representative did not know we were a tech site until after the RMA was processed!
If you are on a budget, you are more likely to spend less on faster RAM speeds. Many budget conscious enthusiasts settle for less highly-clocked RAM, or perhaps try for a manual overclock. For gaming, 8GB is sufficient, although for other tasks that involve multi-tasking, 16GB or more of RAM might be preferable, as we saw in some cases from using our 16GB Beast RAM modules. Kingston’s HyperX Predator memory at 2800MHz is amazingly fast, and it is for those who demand the very highest performance from their PC components.
FURY is available in 4 colors for those who wish to color-coordinate their PC, and we think that White looks great.
For ABT’s flagship Core i7-4770K PC, running everyday tasks and for most of our benchmarking, we have settled on using 16GB of Kingston HyperX Beast DDR3 at 2133MHz. It is slightly faster than the FURY stock speeds of 1866MHz; it brings advantages of 16GB over 8GB, and the DIMMs are much lower profile than the Predator RAM which allows us to easily test more CPU coolers. For testing extreme overclocks, or for extracting every bit of performance out of our Haswell platform, we will use the HyperX Predator RAM at 2800MHz.
For everyday tasks, and especially for gamers, we would recommend Kingston’s HyperX FURY 1866MHz DDR3 as being excellent bang-for-buck!
We are looking forward to publishing our next evaluation early next week which will feature Optical Storage as we compare OWC’s latest external 16x BluRay to our older ASUS 12X internal writer. We will also post our impressions of SHIELD and Half Life 2, as well as a Kingston 240GB mSATA evaluation. And we are still working on FCAT. Stay tuned!
In the meantime, make sure that you follow us on our ABT forum.
Happy Gaming!
Mark Poppin
ABT Senior Editor
