ocaholic - Memory > DDR3 > Patriot Viper 3 Venom Red 2x8GB DDR3-2133 CL11 1.5V Review

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Closer Look

After the purchase, the modules are to be extracted out of a plastic tray sitting inside a thin cardboard box, which broadcasts some printed marketing.

The shade of red used on the Venom might look classy inside, say, an ASUS ROG board but the green color of PCB certainly exposes Viper’s humble beginnings and can serve as a distraction for modding perfectionists.

All submodifications of the Viper 3 series use medium height heatspreaders made out of stamped aluminium. To improve overall performance with this lightweight design, Patriot’s engineers have gone for the holes in the top part of the heatsinks which are meant to catch some perpendicular flow that is very likely to come from a nearby CPU heatsink.

Thanks to weak adhesive, the heatsinks are easy to remove. With the metal out of the way, we found our modules to be based on a modification of Hynix memory chips of 4Gbit density, commonly referred to as MFR.

SPD is where things get interesting on this version of the Viper. As usual, it has five JEDEC profiles meant to make things work out of the box, but whereas the DDR3-1600 profile usually has all the timings in dual figures, on 2133C11 we surprisingly see 9-9-9-24.
Another unusual thing about is the presence of AMP profile next to the usual XMP. Patriot stand behind all the AMD-branded memory so they are using their expertise to create a profile which will automatically set the memory to rated speeds not only on Intel, but on AMD-based platforms as well . A very nice touch, we think.

Page 2 - Closer Look

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Photo Gallery

Page 3 - Photo Gallery

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Testing Method & Test Setup

To test the overclocking capabilities of the memory we are going to use Intel’s recently released Haswell platform. As memory overclocks are known to vary between different motherboards, we are going to perform the tests using two different platforms to be sure that our numbers are reliable.

Motherboard	ASUS Maximus VI Gene (BIOS 0607) Gigabyte Z87X-OC (BIOS F5q)
CPU	Intel Core i7-4770K ES @ 4.0 GHz
Graphic card	ASUS GTX 580
Memory	Patriot Viper 3 Venom Red PV316G213C1KRD
SSD	Samsung PM840 Pro
PSU	Seasonic Platinum 660 Watts
OS	Windows 7, 64 bit SP1

Even though Haswell is very flexible on the memory frequency one can set, very few people actually do base clock (BCLK) overclocking on their daily setups. Therefore, instead of our previous procedure of fixing the voltage and raising the frequency in 10MHz steps we are now going to fix the frequency and minimize the voltage in 0.01V steps.
As usual, our stability method of choice is HCI Memtest. Since we are dealing with a 16 GB kit, we use eight 1500 MB instances and call things stable if we see all of them to go past 100% without showing a single error.
Not to get things too complicated, we only set the primary timings, command rate (1T) and the memory voltage by hand while the rest of the settings is left for the motherboard and SPD to agree on.

Results

Traditionally, our aim is to see how memory reacts to voltage changes and in case with Hynix MFR this reaction translates in almost linear ability to run higher frequencies without having to raise the CAS latency. What comes to second and third entries in the primary timings list, tRCD and tRP, the main factor for lowest stable values of those is frequency, with voltage playing a role only in borderline areas. Lastly, the tRAS value we use in each part of the testing is a sensible value induced by an educated guess.
Overall, it can be seen why these modules have not been assigned a 2400C10 specification; they would fall that by at least 0.14V. Yet, with these having cleared 2133C11 with ease, we wonder why Patriot don’t bother with releasing any model in between since selling such modules of ‘intermediate’ quality rated for 2400C11 or 2600C12 could have brought them some extra profit.
At this point, let us stop being angry businessmen and look at the situation from daily overclockers’ perspective. In an overclocked daily rig, memory is most likely to run between 1066 and 1300MHz, which is CL10 and CL11 territory given our kit. Yes, 1200MHz 10-12-12-30 might require a slight voltage push but even running 1.79V on a daily basis will not get this memory anywhere near critical temperatures just as long as there is any airflow around it. Still, if you want to let things stay on the safe side, it is always possible to bump CAS value up one notch and drop the need for high voltage at slight performance cost.

Page 4 - Results

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Conclusion

Those familiar with geizhals price comparison tool will discover that offers for 2x8 GB sets of Patriot Viper 3 DDR3-2133 currently start at 127 Euros excluding shipping across the EU. Of course, whether it’s a worthwile purchase depends on the 16 GB offers coming from competitor camps and there are quite a few which might upset the purchase. For a start, we have Team Group 2133C11 and 2400C10 sets, both sporting a lower price tag, courtesy of Caseking. Then there are 2400C11 offers coming from G.Skill, which, as we saw not too long ago, are based on the same Hynix MFR chips and overclock similarly well.
In the end, we can conclude that our previous voyage to the land of Patriot was not a holiday romance; there are other kits in the lineup that are equally attractive. Take these 2133C11 Viper 3 models, for example. You can’t take away from the fact that those are very solid performers, but there are one or two things that spoil the overall experience.

Award

Therefore, we award the 16 GB versions of Viper 3 DDR3-2133 CL11 a rating of 4 stars out of 5.