Kingston Hyper-X 2133MHz Dual Channel Review

Introduction

The memory market has certainly changed rapidly in recent times.

Around the launch of P4 and AMD Bartons your choice for top end RAM was pretty much something from either Crucial or Corsair. With the Socket 775 and AM2 platform the market became swamped with manufacturers all providing different solutions to the same thing. To the regular Crucial and Corsair we also saw OCZ, Geil etc., all gaining a foothold in enthusiast rigs.

With the move to triple-channel on the LGA1366 platform Corsair pretty much became the de facto manufacturer with the XMS RAM for the average user and Dominator for the enthusiast.

However, thanks to some laurel resting there has been a gap for someone else, and Kingston quickly took up the challenge. Putting their decades of Memory experience to work in covering all areas with faster, cheaper, solutions.

So successful have they become at this that the Kingston Hyper-X memory has rightfully become the default kit for everybody from those wanting lots of capacity at little cost, to those who want some insane over-clocking.

We recently saw some LN2 cooling put to work to over-clock a dual-channel Hyper-X T1 kit to a new World Record, and so with dreams of high speeds in our minds we take a look at a Hyper-X T1 4GB kit and see if it's as easy to over-clock with some simple BIOS tweaks as it was with sub-zero cooling.

Technical Specifications

Kingston always produce PDF files for their technical specifications. Given that most of this doesn't mean anything to me either, rather than decide what you might, or might not, be interested in here is a grab of the PDF.

The main points of interest are the good latency of CL7 @ 1333, which only goes up to CL9 @ 2133 (XMP1). But let's take a look at the heat-spreader before we get into the timings and suchlike.