Closer Look

Having ordered the memory, what we found a couple of days later on our table is a carton, which got us excited about the accessories it could possibly contain. But as it turned out a minute later, the box is just a way for Kingston to ship two of their standard plastic two-module trays at the same time.



Matte black is never a bad thing to see as it should easily fit with most of custom themed builds out there. However, the general appearance is slightly spoiled by the standard color of the PCB, which Kingston promise to have replaced by a black one in the newer versions.



What comes down to the heatspreaders used on the Beast, Kingston have made a step down from the mass and the surface ares of ones used on the T1 series and have joined the bandwagon of stamped aluminium jobs. On a positive note, lower height of the Beast improves compatibility with large CPU heatsinks both in terms of ease of mounting and in terms of perpendicular airflow.




Unexpectedly, our sample of 1600C9 Beast is based on Hynix’s 4Gbit memory ICs commonly referred to as MFR. Albeit MFR is currently dominating the overclocking ranks when it comes to chips of ultra high density, our previous experience with 1866C10 has taught us to treat such surprises with a bit of skepticism. What we most likely have in front of us are four modules that have failed higher bins, but whether this actually implies some overclocking cripplage, we will find out a couple of pages later.



The SPD chip on the modules features some basic information about manufacturer, model and production date of the modules. It also containes four JEDEC profiles and an XMP meant to make the platform set the right timings without any additional input from the user.

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Page 1 - Introduction

Page 2 - Closer Look

Page 3 - Photo Gallery

Page 4 - Results

Page 5 - Conclusion