A decade ago, liquid cooling came out as an inaudible alternative for the noisy fans. Even though it has not become as widespread as many predicted, these days you can easily buy or build a water-cooled version of just about any component in your PC and therefore Kingston makes no difference with the H2O series memory.

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From a practical point of view, we cannot quite work out why cooling minor components with liquid is a great idea. Things like RAM do not produce much heat and do not get hot even without a heatsink. Surely, it is more of a question of prestige and since makers like to get involved in marketing battles, special memory with native water-cooling support would inevitably appear on the market.
Kingston’s H2O lineup serves as a nice example as its specifications fully duplicate ones of regular HyperX series but its name points at its special purpose. Since we are not what you would call water-cooling enthusiasts, we are going to review our 8GB sample of DDR3-2133 as if it just is a regular air-cooled kit.

Manufacturer	Kingston
Series	HyperX H2O
Part Number	KHX2133C11D3W1K2/8GX
Type	DDR3
Capacity	8 GB (2 x 4GB)
Frequency	2'133 MHz
Timings	11-12-11-30
VDIMM	1.6 Volt
Registred/Unbuffered	Unbuffered
ECC	No
Cooling	Passive Heatspreader
Waranty	Lifetime warranty
Package Type	Plastic Blister

No matter how you look at it, a timing-set of 11-12-11-30 is not an attribute of a high-performance memory. Of course, there is nothing an overclock won’t fix, however, out recent experience with Kingston has taught us not to set the expectations too high. But before we start bumping our kit around in the overclock testing, let’s first have a look at what it is made of.

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 4 - Results
Page 2 - Closer Look	Page 5 - Conclusion
Page 3 - Photo Gallery

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