How Much Does It Cost?
Well, this is where it all falls apart, as frankly, the price on Amazon is just too high right now. At £166.40, it’s one of the more expensive kits I’ve seen recently, and the much faster and fancy RGB Corsair kit is actually about £40 cheaper. I don’t know about you, but I can do a LOT with £40, so TeamGroup need to get their price in line with the recent price drops from their rivals. I would expect this kit to be pretty much right around £95-105 and not a penny more. I also found it on OCUK, but again the price is still higher than I’d like to see right now.
Overview
While the price is a biting point here, I’ll not push on that too hard, as these things often change daily for all brands, and I could check tomorrow and it all be great… in fact, I will check tomorrow! Do shop around though, and if you can get it cheaper, as it should be, it’s a decent memory kit for those… well, I was going to say those who don’t want to spend too much money, doh!
The design is nice enough though, albeit, it’s basically the same heat spreader we’ve seen on a fair few of the Vulcan Alpha series memory kits. The aluminium heat spreader has a nice low-profile design, so slim form factory builds, or even those that have larger heatsinks on the CPU that limit memory height, will all benefit from this design.
While there are larger and more fanciful designs on the market, they’re certainly not to everyone’s taste. Sometimes simplicity is king, and the plug-and-play nature, combined with the no-fuss RGB-free design is sure to appeal to plenty of people too.
When it comes to performance, I can’t see why this wouldn’t be decent memory for a gaming-focused build, it’s got performance that largely averages out to what I expected to see. However, there’s certainly room for some improvements in regard to latency, which was on the high side, but not outside of what I have seen from AMD hardware in the past.
Should I Buy One?
If you’re building a gaming PC and want memory that isn’t going to cause height conflicts and doesn’t have the RGB curse that has frankly taken over most gaming memory kits, then the T-Force Vulcan Alpha is more than up to the task. However, for more complex rendering tasks, the latency needs to be improved, and the price needs to come down a little bit to make it competitive in a market where memory prices are largely at the best they’ve been for a long time, otherwise, it’s hard to truly recommend it, but at the same time, there’s nothing really wrong with it either. If you do get it though, I suggest you try give it a little overclock, as the results made it much more competitive.
