Kingston HyperX ’10th Anniversary’ DDR3 1866MHz 8GB Memory Kit Review

Starting off with CPU-Z, we can see the timings set at 9-11-9-27 and running at a command rate of 1T leading us to believe that there are good things to lie ahead when it comes to giving the kit a little push later on.

After CPU-Z had confirmed our settings had been applied, we fired up AIDA64 to check the stock performance of the memory on our Z77 motherboard.

Looking at the bandwidth out of the box we can see that the 10th Anniversary kit has got a lot to offer, even at 1866MHz with speeds of 20090MB/s read, 18304MB/s write and 21930 MB/s copy with  latency of 38.2ns.

We expect the bandwidth to rise a little when raising the speed but as to how much we will get is to be seen, so time to crack on with the overclocks.

The first thing with any overclock is to get a ball park idea of where the top speed lies to to find this we raise the divider to the next level and see if the system boots.  To our amazement, the test bench booted without a fuss with  the divider brought up to the 2000MHz mark, but no further. Given the already greatly increased speed at stock timings, and no boot at 2133, raising the BCLK was going to be gradual to reach a top mark.

Eventually after only 0.5MHz increase in the BLCK, and with the CPU raised to 4.5GHz to open up the memory controller we were left with a top speed of 2010MHz. Very impressive for stock timings.

Looking back in AIDA we can see how much of an effect the increase has had and we find a raised read speed of 23076MB/s, write of 23070MB/s and 25358MB/s showing that even at stock this kit has so much to give.

Given the ease of overclocking so far, its back into BIOS and back to the dividers, after a successful boot at 2133MHz and a failed but very close boot a 2200MHz, we know that we are working in a very narrow window. Leaving the divider at 2133MHx and bringing up the BCLK to 103MHz gave us a speed of 2197MHz. Given the near boot success at 2200, we know felt that we had to be close.

Saldy though after many boots and crashes due to instability, even with auto timings we were left with a BCLK of 101MHz, but a speed of 2154MHz.  Maybe a little addition to the voltage would assist, but this moving into an uneven territory for some given 1.65V is already close to a limit for most modules.

To prove Kingston have what it takes, we again find a gain in bandwidth with speeds now up to 23614MB/s read, 23388MB/s write and 26843MB/s copy. Latency has come down by around 5ms to 33.9ns. We do not as well that even given that relatively large jump in the speeds, the timings have stayed at a moderately tight level of 10-11-10-30 but with a raised command rate to 2T.

It would have been nice to see the kit go a little further on the BLCK and maybe over the 2200Mhz mark, but what we did find is that getting to the level that we did was very easy and to be honest, any user could easily jump in and overclock the memory without having to touch the BLCK and get a good benefit from it as well.