Kingston Technologies have been producing PC components for many years now. They are the world’s largest independent manufacturer of memory products for a wide range of uses from desktops and notepads, to digital cameras and hand-held computers. They also provide contract manufacturing for most of the large semiconductor OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturer). Kingston also manufactures a range of super high speed enthusiast equipment; a very good example of witch is the 512MB HyperX PC4000 Dual DDR (Double Data Rate) kit.

The flashy metallic blue dual DDR set come packaged as you would expect a product of such quality to, secure yet easily accessible. The RAM (Random Access Memory) itself is unmistakable, its bright blue heat sinks designed to dissipate the heat produced by the high speed memory chips, stand out proudly with HyperX stamped on the side.
 

RAM is a major part of your computer, and can make a substantial difference in your computers performance depending on the speed of it. If you’re not a computer enthusiast there isn’t really much point in bothering about the speed of the RAM that you have in your PC, just the amount depending on the applications you are wanting to use. However, if you’re looking to push your computer to its limit by overclocking, then you will need some high speed RAM with the stability to take being overclocked.

Most mainboards at the moment only support DDR RAM up to DDR400/PC3700. So why you ask do you want to buy DDR500/PC4000, well, it has the ability and stability to run at DDR500 which is what is really needed when you are seriously looking to overclock your CPU properly. This is basically because when overclocking, your RAM clock speed and your FSB (Front Side Bus) of you CPU (The thing you increase when overclocking you CPU) are linked. This means that when the CPU is being overclocked, the clock speed of your RAM is also being increased, hence standard DDR400 clocked RAM starts to become unstable when pushed too far.

During overclocking tests I was unable to test the HyperX PC4000 to its full capability due to poor cooling of my CPU. I was only using Thermaltake’s Spark 7+ Heat Sink and Fan, which in its self is a nice peace of kit (See the Reviews page), but doesn’t have the capabilities to keep my processor cool enough when trying to overclock above 3.3Ghz. This meant I had my 3.0GHz P4 Prescott running at 3.3GHz with its FSB at 219, and the RAM clocked at 438 (DDR438). As would be expected, the HyperX PC4000 kit performed beautifully under these conditions and has much more potential to be taken advantage of.

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When it came down to benchmarking I used Futuremark’s PCMark 2004 and SiSoftware’s Sandra as both have specific memory tests. PCMark 2004 gives your memory a score which is then compared against scores given to tests for different memory sticks. Sandra is particularly good as it tests the memory bandwidth and has pre-set scores for the most common memory types to be compared against the calculated bandwidth of the RAM being tested.   Test System Intel Pentium 4 3.0GHz Prescott Abit IC7-Max3 Intel 875P Chipset From the benchmarks, it proves that the Kinston HyperX PC4000 kit performs extremely well, and definitely outperforms the standard OEM RAM. With PC marks of 4617 (200 MHz) and 5144 (219 MHz) compared to the score of 2302 for the standard DDR266, you don’t need to be a computer genius to see the difference. The bandwidth test from Sandra show the same results, with integer buffer, and floating point buffer of 4471 MB/s and 4459 MB/s respectively (clocked at 200 MHz) and 4896 MB/s and 4928 MB/s (clocked at 219). This compared to the OEM DDR 266 which had an integer and floating point buffer of 1560 MB/s and 1559 MB/s it really proves the point. So what does this really mean, well it means that you have smoother and cleaner transition between programs that are in use. This is because the information stored on the ram can be read, wrote and copied much quicker. This does increase the performance in game, with less slowdown as you move through the levels. So to conclude, if your looking to upgrade your RAM and you have a bit of money at you disposal Kingston HyperX PC4000 is definitely an impressive choice to give your PC that little extra boost, especially when looking to overclock, however unless your water cooled you are fairly limited on how far you can go.