Mushkin PC16000 Radioactive 6GB Review

Mushkin PC16000 Radioactive 6GB Review

Conclusion

So what can we take away from todays review of the Mushkin Radioactive?

Firstly it seems to follow a fairly popular trend we’ve been seeing lately in that although the stock, ‘out of the box’, product is fairly good, it takes a bit of an overclock to get the best out of it. Sure that sounds obvious but it’s not just about an overclock making it faster, that’s to be expected. It’s rather than it feels restricted at stock and only starts to stretch its legs once you ramp everything up a bit. Like asking Usain Bolt to run down your hall.

Why this is a feature lately we don’t know. Maybe it’s manufacturers responding to Intels lead of producing 4.5GHz capable chips and then giving us 100MHz increments on a 3GHz speed every model rather than just releasing them with everything already on tap.

Regardless the Radioactive is ok at stock. Nothing special. Nothing bad. Just, alright. At stock for the retail of about £145 for this 6GB kit we’d recommend it if you particularly wanted yellow heat-spreaders. Otherwise the list of kits you can choose from is as long as you’ve got time to look through them.

Once overclocked properly with a 200BCLK and the timings reduced it really goes to town. It leads all of our graphs except the PC Mark Vantage one and that takes so long and works the whole system so hard that it only takes a 10 second hiccup in your rig during testing to have a huge drop in your final score.

As we said in the intro, normally more esoteric colour or design schemes are put on mediocre products knowing you’re limited to those if you have a desire for a particular theme in your system.

Mushkin have gone the other route and given you the same quality product, but with a choice of a insanely yellow Frostbyte heat-sink should you desire such a colour in your system.

Good value, high performance and different looks give us reason enough to award a Silver Award to the Radioactive.

 

   

Thanks to Mushkin for providing the Radioactive for review. Discuss in our forums.