Closer Look
Viper 3 modules make their way to a potential customer being locked by a plastic tray inside a thin cardboard box.
It’s a matter of taste, but we find the sight of matte black heatsinks very attractive. What we do see as a potential issue, though, is the green colour for PCB which might scare off some modding perfectionists.
Weighing in at 35 grams per module, the sheet aluminium heatsinks of Viper 3 series look more like an afterthought rather than a serious cooling solution.
With heatsinks out of the way, thanks to relatively weak adhesive, we found our modules to be based on Hynix 2Gbit memory chips, commonly referred to as CFR.
Apart from the basic information on the memory, standard JEDEC profiles and an XMP profile, the SPD module of this Viper 3 model also features an AMP which is meant to make memory work at its rated speeds on AMD platform without any input from the user. In cases when AMP is not present, some motherboards might be able to read the data off the XMP, but since XMP is meant for Intel platforms, things might not always go smooth.