About G.Skill : Establishes in 1986, G.Skill is a leading memory & solid State Drive manufacturer based in Taipei, Taiwain. The company's top priority is Quality. All of the products undergo a series of the most rigorous tests and strict quality processes. In addition to a commited, qualified IC testing house to examine the Gskill products. All G.Skill products are 100% tested to ensure the highest yield, reliability and Quality.

 

  

 

Early March Gskill launched their brand new Sniper series. Targeted specifically at the gamers, blending a firearm heatspreader design with high capacity dimms. Starting at 8gb ( comprising 2 x 4gb dimms) and going up to a nutty 24Gb.

   

 

As you can in the in the above list, all platforms are covered ( besides the aging socket 775 ). The lovely Mia from G.SKill send Madshrimps the triple channel 12GB 1600Mhz CL7 X58 kit. Time to get the Gulftown out of the box and pop in these beauties on the Asus motherboard.

 

 

Command rate 2T... nah let's test 1T only... let's see if they can be overclocked, with what timings, But first stock tests too warm them up, after the initial photoshoot...

No more brown cardboard box, but a new blister design that shows off them eyeball popping heatspreaders quite nicely

 

 

They look darn sweet, I must say the design is pretty spot on. Also the black PCB adds to that final classy touch.

 

   

 

 This kit really targeted at the more mainstream user that wants that little extra. Far better speeds are not to be expected from a similar quantity 12Gb C8 kit.

 

 

 

 

Some more pictures of the nicely crafted Snipers dimms. The heatspreaders are available in Black (like our test sample, baptised SR model) or in Army Metallic green( SR2 model). It all depends on the kit you opt for...

 

 

 

 

 

Too bad no ram cooler is included, but ofcourse why design a sexy heatspreader if you block the view by a ram cooler...

Our test setup consists of the following parts :

Asus Rampage III Formula X58 board (bios 0505)
Intel 990X @4Ghz, uncore 3600mhz watercooled
Asus GTX480, 266.58WHQL drivers
Windows 7 64Bit Professional

 

12GB 1600 CL7-8-7-21 versus 12GB 1600 CL9-9-9-24 :

 

The Sniper 12Gb rams were tested at stock clocks vs a simulated Sniper kit running at 1600 9-9-9-24 1T :

Why this test you might ask ? Well to show you how worthwhile or not, it is to invest in a high end ram kit. Most high quantity ram kits are running far looser main timings on the rams... though isn't the performance loss too much ? Or isn't it as big as some say...

 

 

Both superPi 1M and Wprime 32M being very brief tests, the performance difference between both settings is minimal. With the longer SuperPi 32M the CL7 Snipers gain over 6 secs versus the Cas Latency 9 kit. Wprime remains too CPU dependant, so the difference is minimal and within the margin of error. 

 

 

The bandwith test of AIDA64 shows why the CL7 kit performs better. The READ and COPY numbers are significantly higher. How does this reflect in the rest of the test suite... as synthetic benchmarks don't always relfect real life performance.

 

 

A very small difference during the Futuremark 3D tests, in favour again of the CL7 version.

 

 

Multi Core cinebench getting a nice small boost to with the extra bandwith provided by the Sniper CL7 kit.

 

 

Encoding wise, it's logical that more bandwith reflects in more frames per second rendering. But the difference is nothing jawbreaking.

 

 

Gaming wise, tighter rams don't do much. time and time gain we see the same pattern. Better overclock your GPU and/or CPU to get more frames per second.

 

 

 

 

So conclusion for this page : CAS 7 is slightly faster and more productive then the CAS 9 version. Running the dimms at Command rate 1T didn't pose any problem at all... Now how do they clock...

Overclocking potential :

 

Since this is the first time I've worked with 4Gb PSC powered dimms on the socket 1366 platform. I was looking forward to see if these babies could clock near as good as on the 1155/56 motherboards.

To keep all settings/speeds aligned we opted to stick with the 133 Bclock and to just change ram divider (1600-1866 and 2133). So total CPU clock and uncore speeds remains the same for each opted ratio.

So again using : 133Bclock with a 30 Multiplier, totalling in a 4000Mhz CPU speed. The Uncore was kept at 3600Mhz. Back to back locked at 4 and the Command Rate if possible set to 1T.

 

We just tested the stock dividers, so 1600 vs 1866 and 2133Mhz.

With HCI Memtest Pro we tested how stable the sticks were able to run.

We got the following timings out of Gskills latest creation :

1866Mhz CL8-9-8-24 1T at 1.65Vdimm

2133Mhz CL9-11-10-27 1T at 1.67Vdimm

2133Mhz CL9-11-9-27 was not possible, not even at elevated voltages of 1.75Vdimm. Yes they passed the entire test suite but would fail in HCI's memtest before passing 200%

While these might seem average to some, don't forget these are 4Gb dimms, putting a lot of stress on the Integrated Memory Controller  (IMC)

Also we needed added cooling for 2133Mhz operations, without they would fail in HCI Memtest.

 

Time for the usual test suite. Starting off with SuperPi 1M and Wprime 32M.

 

 

Both being very short tests, but heck we include them anyway. Though overal CPU speed rules tighter timings. Not much to see here, let's move on...

 

 

 The overclocked 1866Mhz Snipers are taking a small advantage over the stock kit. Being it SuperPI32M or Wprime 1024. Those who are expecting some more gain with more ram speed, are wrong. With the 2133Mhz divider, the RTL (Round Trip Latency) values were pretty loose set. So we corrected them to 59-60 to get performance back up. Secondly the timings had to be pretty loose 9-11-10-27 to pass HCI memtest.

 

 

Both our 3DMark tests show us the same outcome. 1866Mhz slightly topping the stock kit, 2133Mhz trailing again.

AIDA64 clarifies a bit more what is going on : at the 1866 divider we get a small increase in overal bandwith. 2133Mhz however is struggling to keep up with the stock SPD settings. And this after correcting the Round Trip Latency. Without it was set at 56 and performance was sloooooooow.

 

 

Maxmem, one of the benchmarks being used at Hwbot.org tells the same tale.  We already discovered similar lack of efficiency on X58 : higher ram speeds with looser timings is usally just as fast then slower ram speed with tighter timings...

 

 

1866Mhz crawling ahead of the stock settings. The 2133Mhz setting still can't make the difference. On X58 best option is to run these sticks out of the box, or slightly overclocked... though it doesn't even seem worth the hassle

 

 

Hardly any scaling, 30 points is negligable between 1600 or 2133Mhz. Flashback : seeing simularities when I tested the Kingston 2250CL9 kit... lower ram speed with tighter timings was as fast, if not faster then higher speeds with loose timings...

 

 

 

 

Our 4 game tests follow up on the results of the above tests. Slight advantage for the 1866Mhz divider... but it will be more worthwhile to overclock that GPU to increase FPS...

 

 

 

 

Conclusion : 1600 or 1866Mhz is optimal on X58... 2133Mhz is far from. Unless you enjoy lots of subtiming tuning you can maybe get the performance on par. On Sandy Bridge these sticks are best run at high speeds...

 

Time to test them on some other platforms.. (ofcourse not in triple channel config)

First up the old, but still magnificent Rampage Extreme

Socket 775 :

 2 x 4Gb dimms at 1800Mhz CL8-10-8-27 2T 1.65Vdimm fully stable on the Asus Rampage Extreme (X48)

 

 

Socket 1155 :

2 x 4Gb dimms at 2133Mhz CL9-11-10-27 2T 1.65Vdimm : fully stable on the Sandy Bridge platform

 

 

 

AM3 :

2 x 4Gb dimms at 2000Mhz 9-10-9-27 1T 1.65Vdimm on 1090T.

 

 

 

At looser timings we even could manage to get 2100Mhz stable on the 1090T...

 

 All the above clocks were tested with HCI Memtest and Linx or Prime95 testing. Not bad for a 1600mhz rated kit, seems pretty polyvalent.

G.Skills latest addition, targeted mainly at gamers and casemodders, simply looks stunning. In typical style G.Skill makes the Snipers available in a zillion different versions. If quantity is your thing, Gskill got you totally covered. With kits ranging from 8 to a whopping 24Gb. Last but not least the OC potential seems promising, ofcourse nothing can be warranted, but going up to 2133Mhz is pretty amasing, but...

 

Now back to this particular triple channel kit. It seems after some testing that the Gksill engineers have done their job pretty well. The out of the box clocks on the X58 are pretty rock solid performers, coming very close in performance to the 1866Mhz dividers ( with looser timings ) and even beating 2133Mhz clocks... It's a mixed bag with Intels socket 1366. If you want to maximize performance, timings should remain tight too... if you have to loosen the timings , the extra ram speed will not be as beneficial as on eg the Sandy bridge platform. The latter being more dependant on raw ram speeds, less on ram timings.

 

 

Retailing at 220 euros, this kit is in the upper price level. Though very competively priced compared to the competitors offerings. 1866Mhz kits are retailing at over 240 euros, 2133Mhz kits over 450 euros. The latter being kits with far less impressive timings (9-11-9-27 for 1866 and 10-10-10-30 for 2133Mhz)  Not even close then the clocks we reached with the overclocked Gskill Sniper kit. 

But in all honesty : Is all this fancyness really worth the extra cash over a more comon 1600Mhz CL8/9 kit  ? A gamer will not notice the lower latency or the extra one FPS gain.  A 12Gb 1600CL 9 kit retails around 120 euros and the tiny performance loss will not be noticeable by the end user.

Secondly  for gaming purposes, do you really need 12Gb of ram ? I didn't notice any FPS gains by going from 6 to 12Gbs. In respect, Windows and some games loading times were better with the larger quantity of RAM, though the few secs gained don't justify the hole in ya wallet. But if besides gaming, you open a zillion of applications at the same time, the more ram the merrier. But that will be totally program dependant if it can eat up all of your memory resources.

 

 

 

The above critcism aside, G.Skill was again able to send us a high quality and stunning looking RAM kit. The timing specs are amasing, but the downside of all this is that price/performance ratio goes down the drain. A lower specced kit would perform almost as good in daily apps and will set you back only for half the price. Being a gamer myself I would rather opt for the CL9 version of the Snipers, to combine beauty with a high bang for the buck ratio. But if you want the fastest 4Gb dimm kit out there and you don't mind to pay a premium price, these 1600CL7's have to be on your must buy list.

 

 

 

The good :

• fast rams at the rated speed
• good OCing potential
• did I already mention the sexy looks ?

The bad :

• One of the heatspreaders had no ideal contact with the ICs

 

 

I wish to thank Mia, Tia, Tina and Frank from G.Skill for the Sniper review sample

 

Rogier and Milan from Asus for the ASUS Rampage Formula III

 

The whole crew of Tones for supporting the Shrimps day in, day out