Review: Kingston's DDR3 2,000MHz 6GB Core i7 memory kit

by Tarinder Sandhu on 10 March 2009, 13:20 3.95

Tags: HyperX DDR3-2,000 6GB, Kingston

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qaq7r

Add to My Vault: x

A twist or two



Here they are on a Gigabyte EX58-UD5, placed into the white-coloured slots. A built-in XMP profile makes it (relatively) easy to set them up to 2GHz, yet you need to navigate past the quagmire of Core i7 memory overclocking considerations before the frequency is achieved. CPU-Z identifies the XMP settings rather strangely; fancy some DDR3-3,500 RAM?



Anyway, here's the magical 2,000MHz speed.

Something strange

We encountered an anomaly during testing, where the quantity of memory reported in CPU-Z and Windows was down to 4GB, albeit still in tri-channel mode. See for yourself:




Note the 4GB size? The issue would crop-up sporadically, intimating the use of three modules with capacities of 2GB, 1GB, and 1GB, respectively.

After an hour or so spent troubleshooting and trying on a different board, the issue seems localised to the Gigabyte EX58-UD5 with the F5d BIOS.

Let's get to some numbers now.