G.SKILL RipjawsX DDR3 2133MHz CL9 4GB Kit & Turbulence II Fan

[AFQ]

G.SKILL RipjawsX DDR3 2133MHz CL9 4GB Kit & Turbulence II Fan

Introduction:

G.SKILL, established in 1989, is one of the most popular memory manufacturers in the world. Their main aim is to provide superior memory products with excellent after-sales services to keep pace with ever growing needs of enthusiasts. All of their memory products need to pass rigorous tests and strict quality control procedures to make their way to the consumers. In addition to that hand tested in G.SKILL labs to ensure the highest product quality.

G.SKILL is currently providing high quality desktop memory, notebook memory and solid state drives.

Today, we’ll be having a detailed look at G.SKILL’s recently launched RipjawsX series dual channel memory kit. RipjawsX is the follow-up series of their renowned Ripjaws series. RipjawsX memory kits are specifically designed for Intel P67 and H67 platforms but they do work with X58 and P55 platforms too. G.SKILL launched a number of memory kits with different capacity, speeds and timings in RipjawsX series. The one we have here is a dual channel 4GB kit which is rated to run at an impressive 2133MHz with 9-10-9-28 timings at only 1.5v. The specific kit we have carries blue heatsinks and comes with G.SKILL Turbulence II memory fan.


Packaging and the Memory:

G.SKILL RipjawsX comes in a simple brown box made from environment friendly card board. It has a little G.SKILL logo on top and a sticker showing that this kit is specifically designed for P67 and H67 platforms.

Back of the box has some stickers showing different specs of the memory kit. Contact info of G.SKILL’s technical support and RMA department is also mentioned on the back.

Opening the box will reveal Turbulence II Fan placed in the center with two memory sticks placed on the sides packed in little white Styrofoam bags.

This particular RipjawsX kit comes with blue heat spreaders. Heat spreaders have been slightly redesigned as compared to the old Ripjaws Series.

One side of the both sticks contains little stickers showing different specs of the kit. Other side carries a blue RipjawsX Sticker.

This dual channel kit has a total capacity of 4GB with 2GB on each stick. It’s rated to run 2133MHz CL9-10-9-28 with only 1.5v.

New RipjawsX heatsinks not only looks stunning but they also provide sufficient cooling to the memory chips.

G.SKILL RipjawsX comes with 6-layer green colored PCB. Initially, PCB was shown to be black by G.SKILL. Anyhow, it doesn’t affect functionality of the kit.

G.SKILL Turbulence II is ready-to-mount right out of the box. It comes with a user guide which contains specifications, warranty information and installation instructions. Turbulence II cooler is covered by 1 year warranty from the date of purchase.

It comes with black powder coated frame which contains two clear 50mm fans. These fans are rigged up with three blue LEDs each.

These fans operate at voltage ranging from 7v to 13.8v. They rotate at 3500RPM producing 8.60CFM and 22dBA of noise.

These fans are wired up together to a single molex male-female connector. Fan wire is nicely braided into black.

This is how it looks when it’s in action.

Specifications:

Test Setup:

Overclocking and Testing:

Like every other DDR3 memory, this kit runs at JEDEC standard (1333MHz, CL9) by default. To achieve its rated speeds, you need to enable XMP profile from BIOS. Enabling the XMP profile will take the memory to its rated speeds of 2133MHz CL9-10-9-28 with 1.5v.

Here is a shot of CPUz showing XMP, part number and other info of this memory kit.

I’ll overclock this memory far ahead of its XMP profile speeds but before we look at how well this memory kit overclocks let’s have a quick look at some facts about memory overclocking and my overclocking procedure:

I selected P55 chipset to test overclocking capability this memory kit instead of Sandy Bridge (P67/H67) because with P67 you can’t overclock the memory in the traditional manner. You can only adjust multiplier ratio which will change the memory speed to preset levels (i.e. 800MHz, 1066MHz, 1333MHz, 1600MHz, 1855MHz, 2133MHz and 2200MHz) but with P55 you can freely adjust the memory speed to whatever you like. Memory overclocking is a very difficult task. There are a lot of things you have to keep in mind to get the most out of it. There are many settings and you need to find the best possible combination. Increasing memory speed will not give you enough boost until you fine tune your timings too and other way around. Timings play a vital role in your memory performance. Then voltage comes into play, you can’t keep on increasing memory voltage especially with X58 and P55 chipset as memory controller (IMC) is located on your processor and too much voltage can damage it. To achieve higher memory clocks increasing memory voltage only will not help, you’ll need to increase IMC voltage as well. Overall, it’s a very complicated and time consuming process.

- As most of you know that memory is linked with base clock. We need to change base clock in order to change memory speed (in P55 and X58 ) hence it changes overall speed of processor but we’ll try to keep processor clock near 4.0GHz by changing multiplier when needed.
- Memory stability will be tested with MemTest, it’s a small but very handy tool to test stability of memory.
- I’ll test the memory modules in Dual Channel mode.

Below is a graph showing the overclocked speeds and timings of this RipjawsX memory kit:

This RipjawsX kit proved to be a really good overclocker. With ramping up the voltage to 1.65v you can reach an impressive speed of 2380MHz with 9-11-9-27 timings.
With 9-9-9-24 timings, it can even surpass it rated speed. Overall, it has great overclocking capabilities.

Let’s move on to some performance testing now, we’ll test our overclocked memory with a couple of different softwares.

- Lavalys Everest:

Lavalys created and developed market leading computer diagnostics, hardware monitoring, network audit, and benchmarking software solutions based on our proven, award-winning EVEREST technology.

We used Lavalys Everest Memory Benchmark tool to test read, write and copy speeds. Furthermore we also tested Latency.

Read

Write

Copy

Latency

- MaxxMEM Preview:
It tests your computer’s raw memory performance, combining copy, read, write and latency tests into one global score. It contains the same Memory benchmark routine as MaxxPI does. So your reached results will be comparable to Memory/Latency benchmarks done by MaxxPI.

Memory Score

Latency Score

Total MaxxMem Score

Final Words:

G.SKILL RipjawsX is really impressive. It not only looks stunning, it has great overclocking capabilities too. It runs at an amazing speed of 2133MHz with only 1.5v, which is very rare. This type of kit gives you great performance without producing much heat due to low voltage. It runs cool and saves energy.

The included Turbulence II memory fan adds a lot of value to the package. It helps in keeping the memory even cooler. The blue LED fans and black frame looks really impressive, it makes your gaming rig stand among others.
G.SKILL RipjawsX Memory kit comes with lifetime warranty which is backed by G.SKILL’s impressive technical support and RMA Department.

This kit is a great product and you guys will love it for sure; it gets PakGamers Top Pick Award. The products that perform exceptionally well in our testing get this award.

-Pros:
• Impressive overclocking capabilities
• Great looks
• Lifetime warranty
• Bundled ram cooler
• Intel Sandy Bridge Ready
• Low Voltage

-Cons:
• None

Soon, this kit will be available on IAMEXTREME.

NOTE: G.Skill guarantee RipjawsX DDR3 1600+ memory kits operation on P67/H67
platforms and its entry level DDR3 1333MHz kits are also compatible with
P55/H55 platforms. However my DDR 2133MHz RipjawsX kit did run well on my
P55 platform.

[Optimus]

wow AFQ nice review there

[Jadefox]

Nice pics + review

[ali tayyab]

The bit about adjusting memory speed with P55 freely (as compared to a 6 series ) is incorrect. To increase the memory speed, the bclk must be raised. It is not possible to *freely* raise memory speed as compared to a 6 series chip set without touching other parameters (in this case being the base clock). The whatever you like part is technically incorrect as it is tied to the maximum base clock limit of the board/ processor.

A more accurate description would be that it allows you to adjust base memory clock in 1 MHz steps by altering the base clock. The real effect of this rise will be dependent on the memory divider set in the bios.



On the 6 series the same memory dividers change how the memory runs as compared to the processor speed. As the base clock is locked (personally i can take it to 105, but a paltry 5 units?), the dividers start from 1:1 and work their way upwards (i'll have to check if they work downwards as well)

[AFQ]

The bit about adjusting memory speed with P55 freely (as compared to a 6 series ) is incorrect. To increase the memory speed, the bclk must be raised. It is not possible to *freely* raise memory speed as compared to a 6 series chip set without touching other parameters (in this case being the base clock). The whatever you like part is technically incorrect as it is tied to the maximum base clock limit of the board/ processor.

And even when the bclk is adjusted, you arent actually playing with memory speed directly, you are influencing how the programmed dividers change the memory speed: I.e. 1:1 bclk: memory will have an equating effect and so on.

On the 6 series the same memory dividers change how the memory runs as compared to the processor speed. As the base clock is locked (personally i can take it to 105, but a paltry 5 units?), the dividers start from 1:1 and work their way upwards (i'll have to check if they work downwards as well)

Thanks for explaining but the bottom line in that you cant overclock memory with P67 the way you can do with P55/X58 even when in both platforms it works in same way. I tried to mention it in an easy way so that everyone can understand.

[ali tayyab]

Thanks for explaining but the bottom line in that you cant overclock memory with P67 the way you can do with P55/X58 even when in both platforms it works in same way. I tried to mention it in an easy way so that everyone can understand.

Point taken.
Memory clocking on unlocked SB processors is a breeze actually. The ratios are independent of CPU speed, which is great. But as on all platforms, over clocked memory produced good synthetic results, but virtually nothing for games!
Can't say how the non K processors behave, but i am pretty sure the ratios are unlocked on them as well

[AFQ]

Point taken.
Memory clocking on unlocked SB processors is a breeze actually. The ratios are independent of CPU speed, which is great. But as on all platforms, over clocked memory produced good synthetic results, but virtually nothing for games!
Can't say how the non K processors behave, but i am pretty sure the ratios are unlocked on them as well

Yeah it works in same way with locked processors too but you can only use presets. For example, you cant run memory at 2000MHz with Sandy Bridge, either it will run on 2133 or 1855.

[CutePoison]

Excellent Review!

[Bluff Master]

review effort is excellent however apprears to be iamextreme.net's marketing catalog

[syed misbah]

excellent......................