Kingston HyperX Predator DDR3 2400MHz 8GB Memory Review

Once we had finished tinkering in the BIOS and setting the XMP profile, we were able to boot with the memory at its rated speed of 2400MHz at 1.65V with its rated timings of 11-13-13-30 and could fire up CPU-Z to double check that the settings had taken under Windows.

After the correct speeds had been confirmed, we then loaded up AIDA64 to see how the stock performance at 2400MHz was in terms of read, write and copy speeds and of course latency.

Taking a look at stock performance, we can see that at 2400MHz, we have some really strong numbers with 20943MB/s read, 18816MB/s write, 22996MB/s copy and a low latency of 36ns. These are some really great numbers compared to other kits we’ve had the chance to test around the same speed rating.

After we had these numbers firmly set in the sand, we could continue to do what we do best; overclock. We started by overclocking our Ivy Bridge i7 3770k to 4.5GHz to eliminate any bottleneck from our system and to open up the memory controller, allowing the memory to have space to breathe. By doing this it should allow our memory to be pushed further than usual but on a kit that is already rated at 2400MHz, we didn’t know how much room we’d have to play around with, but had to stay optimistic throughout and hope for the best.

We started by increasing our 2400MHz divider up to the 2666MHz stepping but found out this was a no go from the start and instead, knew that this was going to be a battle between us and the bus speed. We started off slow, increasing by 1MHz at a time to see how far things could be pushed and ended up getting a stable maximum clock at 104MHz with timings of 12-14-14-32-2T. Trying to push past this, even by .1MHz and slackening the timings further was found to be unsuccessful also, so decided to stick with this and move on to see how the performance increased. Overall we ended up with an overclock, pushing us to 2496MHz which doesn’t sound like a lot when comparing to its stock speed but the performance should show us how worthwhile it ended up being.

To see how the performance was increased, we fire AIDA64 back up and ran the same tests that we used for our stock performance. We found that the performance across all tests increased by quite noticeable amounts, with the read speed now at 23451MB/s, a write speed of 21918MB/s, copy speed of 23675Mb/s and an even lower latency of 36ns. Overall, the speeds had increased by 1000-3000MB/s which is some fantastic performance, especially when its free, right?

While we were overclocking we did find that having a slightly slower speed of 2447MHz overall gave us the better bandwidth as you can see below. Compared to our above final overclock, the read speed had decreased slightly to 22911MB/s but the write and copy speeds dramatically improved to 24004MB/s write and 25947Mb/s copy. The latency got slightly slower to 33.7, but still nothing noticeable when you factor in the 1000-2000MB/s extra on the write and copy speeds.