G.Skill RipjawsZ F3-17000CL9Q-16GBZH (4Gx4)
G.Skill have refreshed their catalogue with a wide range of high speed DDR3 modules recently
Here I’m going to look at a quad channel RipjawsZ 16GB 2133 kit, but I’m going to test it on my Sandy Bridge setup
This is one of the higher end kits, labelled “Enthusiast” and designed for the quad channel X79 platform
Technical Specifications
The timings and 2133MHz speed is fantastic, but the highlight here is the 1.65 Volts it requires, which doesn’t leave much room for over-clocking on the Sandy Bridge setup
Now for a look at the kit itself
Up close
Dressed in the clamshell type packing favoured by G.Skill these days, I much prefer this to the eggshell type you have to cut open
A new brand name and new clothes to boot, each new kit brings a new heat spreader
This is a lower profile heat spreader than the previous RipjawsX series, but it still stands taller than the Ares kit Bryan reviewed
Whilst they do look good, a black PCB and black heat spreaders highlighted with a blue insert doesn’t really do a lot for me
I wouldn’t have minded the inserts being red, but they still look good anyway
Below is a picture to highlight the height of the heat spreaders. The orange one is a DDR2 module with what I would regard as a standard size heat spreader
Test setup
Motherboard: MSI Big Bang Marshall
Processor: Intel Core i7-2600K
Graphics card: MSI GTX580 Lightning
Cooling: Swiftech Apogee XT rev. 2 CPU water block
Power supply: Silverstone SST-ST1000P 1000watt modular PSU
Operating system: Windows 7 64Bit Ultimate
HDD: 2 x Western Digital Black WD1602ABKS 160GB in RAID0
Overclocking
On initial set-up in the BIOS the default speed was 1600MHz CL11-11-11-28-1T @ 1.45 Volts but there are two XMP profiles, problem is, they both default to 2133MHz CL9-11-10-28 2T @ 1.65 Volts. Hmm. Another thing to note is that the CPU I/O voltage is set to 1.354 Volts which is pretty darn close to the limit of 1.4 Volts on Sandy Bridge
I have read other reviews which inferred these modules were only rated at 2000 MHz on Sandy Bridge so it was a relief when testing at the XMP settings didn’t find any faults
Raising the bus speed up to 103.3 yields 2200MHz while dropping the multiplier to 33 to keep the CPU as close to 3.4GHz as I can and again all the test ran without a hitch
For the 103.3 bus overclock I tried to keep the CPU as close to 4.6G as I could but there’s almost a 40MHz CPU speed difference between the 2133MHz and 2200MHz settings so bear that in mind when looking at the graphs
PC Mark Vantage x64
Not an overly impressive start for the 2200MHz setting, falling behind on most of the tests when overclocked
Aida 64 Extreme Memory Benchmark
With these timings I was hoping for a bit more. 20994 is not super fast
Cinebench 11.5
Dependant on the CPU and GPU the overclocked CPU is the booster here
Sisoft Sandra
Memory Bandwidth
There’s not much between the settings, but the 2200MHz tests stand out a bit
Sisoft Sandra
Cache and memory bandwidth
The Cache test loads the CPU cache as well as the memory to show how the memory performance affects the CPU
wPrime 2.07
wPrime focuses more on CPU performance, gut fast memory helps too
The 32m test doesn’t show much, but any improvement on the overclock score here is a bonus
MaxxMEM
The overclock scores are encouraging, but the stock results could be better
Latencies (Ns)
Including latency scores with the other big scores often leaves them unseen, so I thought I’d bunch them all together in one for better reading
The Aida64 results are disappointing here, considering the copy, write and read speeds of the 4.6g overclock and the timings, 42.9 is a bit tame
The MaxMEM results agree with me
Around the 40Ns mark is the target for a 16GB kit on these timings with my kit
Conclusion
16GB of superfast DDR3 2133 memory. What’s not to like
Some of the benchmark results were disappointing, but the overall performance on a Sandy Bridge setup is very good for a 16GB kit
The voltages are a bit concerning, but it is labelled enthusiast for a reason, on X79 boards this wouldn’t be an issue, but even on Sandy Bridge there’s room to overclock
At a push, on Sandy Bridge I’d give these a Bronze for performance, no doubt on an X79 system this would be improved
I’m going to leave you now and get on with being a bit more extreme
Enjoy
G.Skill have refreshed their catalogue with a wide range of high speed DDR3 modules recently
Here I’m going to look at a quad channel RipjawsZ 16GB 2133 kit, but I’m going to test it on my Sandy Bridge setup
This is one of the higher end kits, labelled “Enthusiast” and designed for the quad channel X79 platform
Technical Specifications
The timings and 2133MHz speed is fantastic, but the highlight here is the 1.65 Volts it requires, which doesn’t leave much room for over-clocking on the Sandy Bridge setup
Now for a look at the kit itself
Up close
Dressed in the clamshell type packing favoured by G.Skill these days, I much prefer this to the eggshell type you have to cut open
A new brand name and new clothes to boot, each new kit brings a new heat spreader
This is a lower profile heat spreader than the previous RipjawsX series, but it still stands taller than the Ares kit Bryan reviewed
Whilst they do look good, a black PCB and black heat spreaders highlighted with a blue insert doesn’t really do a lot for me
I wouldn’t have minded the inserts being red, but they still look good anyway
Below is a picture to highlight the height of the heat spreaders. The orange one is a DDR2 module with what I would regard as a standard size heat spreader
Test setup
Motherboard: MSI Big Bang Marshall
Processor: Intel Core i7-2600K
Graphics card: MSI GTX580 Lightning
Cooling: Swiftech Apogee XT rev. 2 CPU water block
Power supply: Silverstone SST-ST1000P 1000watt modular PSU
Operating system: Windows 7 64Bit Ultimate
HDD: 2 x Western Digital Black WD1602ABKS 160GB in RAID0
Overclocking
On initial set-up in the BIOS the default speed was 1600MHz CL11-11-11-28-1T @ 1.45 Volts but there are two XMP profiles, problem is, they both default to 2133MHz CL9-11-10-28 2T @ 1.65 Volts. Hmm. Another thing to note is that the CPU I/O voltage is set to 1.354 Volts which is pretty darn close to the limit of 1.4 Volts on Sandy Bridge
I have read other reviews which inferred these modules were only rated at 2000 MHz on Sandy Bridge so it was a relief when testing at the XMP settings didn’t find any faults
Raising the bus speed up to 103.3 yields 2200MHz while dropping the multiplier to 33 to keep the CPU as close to 3.4GHz as I can and again all the test ran without a hitch
For the 103.3 bus overclock I tried to keep the CPU as close to 4.6G as I could but there’s almost a 40MHz CPU speed difference between the 2133MHz and 2200MHz settings so bear that in mind when looking at the graphs
PC Mark Vantage x64
Not an overly impressive start for the 2200MHz setting, falling behind on most of the tests when overclocked
Aida 64 Extreme Memory Benchmark
With these timings I was hoping for a bit more. 20994 is not super fast
Cinebench 11.5
Dependant on the CPU and GPU the overclocked CPU is the booster here
Sisoft Sandra
Memory Bandwidth
There’s not much between the settings, but the 2200MHz tests stand out a bit
Sisoft Sandra
Cache and memory bandwidth
The Cache test loads the CPU cache as well as the memory to show how the memory performance affects the CPU
wPrime 2.07
wPrime focuses more on CPU performance, gut fast memory helps too
The 32m test doesn’t show much, but any improvement on the overclock score here is a bonus
MaxxMEM
The overclock scores are encouraging, but the stock results could be better
Latencies (Ns)
Including latency scores with the other big scores often leaves them unseen, so I thought I’d bunch them all together in one for better reading
The Aida64 results are disappointing here, considering the copy, write and read speeds of the 4.6g overclock and the timings, 42.9 is a bit tame
The MaxMEM results agree with me
Around the 40Ns mark is the target for a 16GB kit on these timings with my kit
Conclusion
16GB of superfast DDR3 2133 memory. What’s not to like
Some of the benchmark results were disappointing, but the overall performance on a Sandy Bridge setup is very good for a 16GB kit
The voltages are a bit concerning, but it is labelled enthusiast for a reason, on X79 boards this wouldn’t be an issue, but even on Sandy Bridge there’s room to overclock
At a push, on Sandy Bridge I’d give these a Bronze for performance, no doubt on an X79 system this would be improved
I’m going to leave you now and get on with being a bit more extreme
Enjoy
