It's beginning to look like Kingst-mas, rather I mean, Christmas came early for me this year. Valkor put this box down on my desk and my interests piqued! At first, I was excited when I thought it was contained the Predator. However, I opened up the box to find the HyperX Beast, kick ass DDR3 RAM Memory kit! I couldn't tear my computer open fast enough to test these "Beasts" out.
Being a bit of an enthusiast, I'm always eyeing my operating temperatures and normally try to test new hardware in a small and a large case. Since the HyperX "Beasts" come with these Large Heat sinks and an even larger mountable cooling fan; I had to find out what and where I could actually test them as designed as these are taller than your average memory sticks. Before I even opened up my smaller computer, I knew they wouldn't fit in it with the fans attached. So I placed them in my main rig (details below) to get this test poppin.
There is a variety of capacity choices to make according to you needs. Kits start at 8GB and continue through 16, 32 and all the way to 64GB. They also range in speed from 1600MHz - 2400MHz, allowing plenty of room to decide what's right. Not to mention with higher speed applications, the fans could come in handy.
For the purpose of this review, I'll be testing the HyperX Beast with my primary machine. My main rig is powered by a simple, but highly effective Sandy Bridge based 2nd generation Core i3-2105. My mainboard of choice is an Asus P8Z68-V PRO/GEN3, a higher end Asus that will keep me future proof when and if I choose to jump to an Ivy bridge CPU. Rounding out the rest of the major components is an nVidia GTX 570 and a Kingston Hyper X3 120GB SSD. For my operating system I was running a relatively clean install of Windows 8 Pro. Originally, I had a pair of G.Skill Rip Jaw 1333MHz 2 x 4 GB sticks, which got me a composite score of 2175 with Passmark. I also tried a vanilla pair of PNY 2 x 4 GB sticks and scored a still respectable 2056. It should be noted that the G.Skill and the new Kingston Beast ram had XMP profiles, but the PNY did not! The Kingston Beast memory scored a crazy 2569 after I loaded up the XMP profile. That's over a 15% jump from my G.Skill Rip Jaw and a 20% increase over the PNY. That's enough to have a tangible benefit in games and multitasking!
Oh and as expected the Beast ran warm to the touch, but not hot, without the fans.
The Bang:
Overclockers the Kingston's HyperX Beast is your Excalibur with voltage 1.65v. That makes for more stable overclocking set ups. The Beast is also Xmp ready, and that makes a difference… Passmark scored the ram at 2332 having just placed it into my computer; this is an aggregate score that takes into account all things memory related such as latency, read and write times, db operations, pretty much everything. When I enabled XMP Profile 1, the score shot up to 2569, that's just short of a 10% increase in score!
The Slack:
To use it with the fans, this belongs in a case that has some room. It does take up quite a bit of vertical real estate in my rig without the fans too, but if you wanted to use them, you're going to need to check for clearance first. In my small case, I made a mess of everything trying to squeeze the fans in, and eventual gave up. In my mid-tower, they fit quite nicely after I rerouted some power supply wires. It's not pretty, and some would say the fans are excessive or gaudy, but I can't help to feel like it's got to help at least a bit.
Kingston's HyperX Beast don't belong in your mom's PC; only If she's planning on doing some serious gaming or other highly performance critical stuff. This is a great step up if you're upgrading your system; the "Beast" has size and power. XMP ready, what does that mean? Just enable the profile for your Intel chip and Go! I give it a TOV score of 5 out of TOV stars!