Silicon Power – Xpower 4GB Kit

Fifteen years ago, My first computer was a Intel Pentium IBM compatible monster, with 16Mb ram and a 250Mb hard drive. It was running windows 95 because I had upgraded from windows 3.1. This ram kit produced by Silicon Power has over 16 times the clock speed and storage capability. Henry ford produced the Model T for 19 years. Can you imagine where we would be if the technology industry had remained that complacent? I shudder at the thought.

Today we will be looking at the Silicon Power X Power Dual Channel DDR3 2133Mhz Ram Kit. This is available in both dual and triple channel configurations. This is the fastest kit that Silicon Power currently offers and I am excited to see what this baby can do. Follow us as we give the X power the juice to see how it survives.

Packaging:

The packaging has a nice window featuring the stylish heat spreaders, and demonstrating the size of the ram. I am speaking from firsthand knowledge, it is important to know the dimensions of your prospective components. The dimms on Most major boards are very close to the processor socket, and large heat-spreaders can prevent you from using a desired cooler if you don’t do your research.

The exterior packaging highlights the components contained within, however do not provide much in the way of technical specifications.

The interior packaging is slightly different from the standard blister pack i have seen from other manufacturers, the tray is a little more functional and less of a nuisance.

A Closer Look:

The Ram itself looks rather intimidating.

The Heat spreaders are screwed onto this ram, I really appreciate this as it would allow you to remove them if necessary for space reasons, or if you were attaching a third party cooling system.  Some other manufacturers glue their spreaders directly onto the chip greatly discouraging their removal.

Ram is pretty standard, once you get past the heat spreaders there isn’t much to see. Lets see whats under the hood.

Features:

(from manufacturers Spec sheet)

• DDR3 functionality and operations supported as defined in the component data sheet
• 240-pin, un-buffered dual in-line memory module (UDIMM)
• Fast data transfer rates: PC3-12800, PC3-14400, PC3-16000, PC3-17066
• 2GB (256 Meg x 64)
• VDD = VDDQ = +1.65V
• VDDSPD = +3.0V to +3.6V
• Reset pin for improved system stability
• Nominal and dynamic on-die termination (ODT) for data, strobe, and mask signals
• Dual rank
• Fixed burst chop (BC) of 4 and burst length (BL) of 8 via the mode register set (MRS)
• Adjustable data-output drive strength
• Serial presence-detect (SPD) EEPROM
• Gold edge contacts
• Pb-free
• Fly-by topology
• Terminated control, command, and address bus

The majority of us are not electrical engineers and thus do not understand most of the numbers above. The important message to take from all of this raw data, is that the 4Gb memory kit presented here meets or exceeds all manufacturing requirements and specifications.

The Laymans Specifications:

• 2 x 2Gb Modules
• DDR3
• 2133Mhz
• Cas Latency 9
• UN-Buffered

Mechanical Drawing From Technical Specifications:

Specifications:

MODULE SPECIFICATION
Capacity	2x 2Gb
Physical Rank(s)	2 Ranks
Module Organization	256M x 64bit
Module Type	PC3-17066(DDR3 2133)
Speed Grade	SSTL_15
Voltage Interface	1.65V
Power Supply Voltage	8
Burst Lengths	DDR3 SDRAM 128M x 8bit
Dram Organization	8 Layers
Contact Tab	240 pin GOLD Flash Plating
Serial Pd	Support

On to testing!

Testing:

Test Rig:

When you are testing performance ram it is important to make sure the system you have a system that can keep up with the capabilities of the ram.

• Motherboard: Asus Crosshair III formula
• HDD: Western Digital 1Tb Black Edition
• Processor: AMD Phenom II 970 Black edition
• Video : ATI HD5970
• PSU: NZXT Hale 90 1000watt
• Case: NZXT Phantom
• Air cooling

Having never worked with Silicon Power Ram before I wanted to throw the kitchen sink at this kit. The Ram is Intel XMP certified, however it was not recognized on our AMD board. The highest frequency we were able to maintain stability at was 1840Mhz . This was achieved with a 17.5 multiplier, at auto voltages, and a 230 Bus speed. Here are the results.

CPU-Z:

CPU-Z is a software made by the company CPU-ID it is not a bench marking utility, it simply provides some basic information about the memory and CPU of your system, typically you can expect this to give you your clock speed timings,

You can see from the screen shots that CPU-Z is reading a processor clock speed of 4.25Ghz, keep in mind this case is completely air cooled, and running factory voltages.  you can see we have a ram speed of 1840Mhz, the Cas Latency is 11 which differs from the manufacturing specifications. Also the ram is reporting in at Single Channel however it is set at dual channel in the bios.

CAS latency has to do with the speed the ram will access information. The speed of CAS is relative to the clock speed of the ram, the part to look for is lower numbers are better. The manufacturer reports a CAS latency of 9 at 2133Mhz, we should see the same CAS or lower with a lesser clock speed we are performing out. The expected latencies are listed below in the tables per dimm for standard clock speeds

Here is the individual information by DIMM, again take note of the timings table.

Memtache:

Memtache is a benchmarking utility that tests the real world speed of you ram using various common algorithms.

The output is very straightforward, on the right-hand side of the interface it gives the min/average/max scores for each of the benchmarks. Obviously the higher the scores the better.

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Testing Continued:

SiSoft Sandra:

SiSoft is a full featured suite that gives very nice graphical representations of their data. The three tests we ran out of their suite are below.

The first part of the cache and memory benchmark reports on the bandwidth of the memory and cache, in a speed rating, this is the raw power of your device. The higher the score the better, the second portion gives the speed factor, lower scores are more desirable in this instance. This ram has a high bandwidth, however it unfortunately has a high speed factor as well.

The memory bandwidth benchmark produced very similar results for both the float and integer bandwidth benchmarks. The ram tested quite well against the competitors.

The Latency on this memory leaves something to be desired. Cas 11 is not really what should be considered in the realm of performance ram.

AIDA 64:

AIDA 64 is a benchmark that in addition to providing comprehensive information about your system, it also contains a few benchmark capabilities. The application is very light-weight and makes for a handy tool.

For starters it provides the standard statistics about all of the system memory. We also have the specific statistics, it lists both the standard operating frequency, and the manufacturer. This is the only utility we ran that recognized the rams manufacturer.

The memory latency benchmark takes into consideration the cpu – memory latency you can see from the image that while the software reports the ram as DDR2, the overall latency is quite impressive, this can also be attributed to the significantly overclocked processor.

The read, write, and copy speeds of this ram are also quite impressive, when compared against the systems above.

This attractive output simply sums up all of the raw data on the ram kit itself. The other benchmarks provided in AIDA64 compare the specific statistics against a database of known system configurations.

Conclusion:

Silicon Powers 4Gb dual channel 2133 Mhz Ram kit set an impressive goal for itself. When the fastest stock settings that a motherboard will support are 1333 Mhz, This ram kit boasted a 2133 Mhz clock speed with 9 CAS latency. I am sad to report that it fell short. That being said, I was able to overclock the Ram to 1840Mhz, on an AMD system without any difficulty. The heat spreaders performed admirably as the temperature after 2 hours of run time (overclocked) was 98.6 degrees. Also the inclusion of the removable heat spreader was a very useful feature for anyone looking to squeeze them into a tight space, or use an aftermarket cooling solution. Overall I was disheartened by the high latency of the ram but the speed was certainly significantly over stock speeds capable of value ram. In fact I believe the only  reason I was unable  to reach the manufacturer’s listed speed of 2133 Mhz was due to a limitation of the motherboard. If your looking for the best ram to put into your top of the line performance rig, this is not the kit for you, but if your looking for a  ram kit with decent overclocking capabilities, that won’t break the bank this would be worth a look.