G.Skill Ripjaws X 16GB Kit Review

Conclusion

If you take the Ripjaws X 16GB kit purely as a speed monster then it’s easy to come away a little disappointed. Despite the pretty reasonable timings available, and the 1.5v operating voltage, it’s very middling when it comes to actual performance.

Certainly if all you’re interested in is gaming then there isn’t much here to hold your attention.

But looking solely at the performance is missing the point. Yes the performance is only average, but it’s the amount of memory you’ve got available to you, at a good price, that is the real selling point of the 16GB variant of the Ripjaws X.

If you own a fairly modern digital camera that pops pictures out around the 8MB to 20MB it makes a huge difference if you can process them all in one go. Even having four or five open in Photoshop will quickly suck huge quantities of your available memory and so with 16GB available you can sort through your latest artistic outpourings and flick between them easily to decide the ones you want to keep.

What it really boils down to is that you’re getting exactly what you expect.

By and large most of us have a love of computer components and the technical nerdiness behind it all. It’s why we here at OC3D are so passionate about bringing you the best content we can without talking down to you all, because we understand that you must share our passion to be here. So when we say “this is a 1600MHz 16GB RAM Kit retailing for around £120” you know exactly what you’re going to get. It’s not blisteringly fast but what you trade off in speed you gain in capacity. Which is really all there is to say about the G.Skill Ripjaws X 16GB kit. You get an awful lot of memory at average speeds for an average amount of money.

If all you want from your memory is that it’s at the leading edge of speeds, and you don’t really do much image editing or video encoding, you’re better looking elsewhere. If you’re in the market for an awful lot of memory but haven’t got a huge amount of money to spend, this would be exactly the kit you need to buy.

It, to quote a famous woodstain, does exactly what is says on the tin. No surprises whatsoever. It’s not eye-openingly bad, nor is it a secret overclocking monster akin to a E6800. It’s a hell of a lot of RAM, for not a lot of money and therefore deserving of our Silver Award.

Thanks to G.Skill for providing the Ripjaws X for review. Discuss in our forums.