Final thoughts and rating
The purpose of this review, as with all other reviews, is to evaluate a product and to dole out buying advice. In that regard, G.Skill's 16GB (4x4GB) DDR3-1,600 kit scores well in all areas, offering rock-solid stability, mainstream performance and good value on an Intel X79 platform.
Yet through testing we've found a remarkable lack of real-world performance deviation when simply taking two of the modules out, leaving an 8GB kit - 2x4GB sticks - in the system. This is not to suggest that readers should purchase dual-channel kits for a Sandy Bridge-E system, for even 16GB of quality memory barely constitutes 10 per cent of the platform cost. But such is the on-chip cache of these monster processors, rising to over 12MB on the Core-i7 3930K, that the speed and capacity of the supporting memory is relatively unimportant for a wide range of consumer applications - their data-sets are gobbled by the chip's cache.
As an aside, Intel's memory architecture and cache design indirectly show why regular Sandy Bridge processors perform so well; they're tuned for running with two DIMMs.
Understanding the dynamic between Core-i7 3000-series chips and system memory is important when purchasing RAM. The real horsepower in the system is the chip, not the RAM, and so spending huge amounts of money on esoteric memory isn't ideal. It makes sense to go for mainstream RAM and, as such, ticking all the right boxes, we have little hesitation in recommending the £75 G.Skill 16GB kit.
Bottom line: the G.Skill RipJawsZ F3-12800CL9Q-16GBZL is a quality Core-i7 3000-series memory kit at an attractive price. There's little reason to spend more than £75 on SNB-E memory unless every last drop of performance matters to you.
The Good
No hassle plug 'n' play usage
Good value
The Bad
Greater capacity doesn't yield significantly more performance
HEXUS Rating
G.Skill RipJawsZ (F3-12800CL9Q-16GBZL)
HEXUS Awards
G.Skill RipJawsZ (F3-12800CL9Q-16GBZL)
HEXUS Where2Buy
TBC.
HEXUS Right2Reply
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