Closer Look
The
Extreme Masters Viper 3 Limited Edition kit arrives safely boxed in a
transparent plastic blister which has been put in a small cardboard box. The box
features a window that shows one module for better presentation. On the front
next to the window you have the capacity of the kit as well as it's rated
frequency. No informations about timings and voltage visible. On the back there
is also a window that shows the other side of the module with detailed specs and
the part number. Next to the window we have some text in several languages. The
english is good but the other languages like the french seems
translated by some bad online translator from english to taiwanese to russian to
spanish back to taiwanese and then to french. But hey it's funny to
read!
The design
features the logo of Intels Extreme Masters event on the Viper 3 heatspreader. Printed on both sides it
shows the event's logo on the backside and is covered by the specs sticker on the
frontside.
Unlike the Viper 2 Division 2 heatspreader the heatspreader we have here isn't
made of copper. It's made of two aluminium sheets glued to the memory chips. The
blue colour on black PCB is very nice tho and will fit a lot or motherboards.
With heatspreaders out of the way we see that
Patriot chose to make
use of Hynix's CFR PBC memory chips.
The SPD reading tells us more about the memory
itself like the capacity, the name of the manufacturer and the JEDEC profiles
stored which are in 5 accompanied with one XMP profile. The part number is not
displayed, pity. Instead "2133 CL11 Series" is written.
The SPD has been well recognized by the BIOS of our motherboard
as well as by
CPU-Z.
As said in the introduction timings were unusual. Here it gets even more as we
see that the kit is rated at 3T (Command Rate). Usually memory kits are rated 1T
or 2T for some kits with big capacities or more than two modules. Here we have
only two modules of 4GB so the only explanation would be the lack of binning.
Well we will see it's impact on performance and overclocking ability on page 4.
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