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Corsair XMS TWINX1024-3200LLPRO Vs.
Kingston HyperX KHX4000K2/1G

The premium memory market is getting more crowded by the day; with contenders from all the memory makers, even budget brands. I got my hands on two of the "most popular" pairs of memory in the current enthusiast market.

My contenders were both made for dual-channel usage. The first pair was from budget RAM maker Kingston with their "high-performance" HyperX line of memory, model KHX4000K2/1G. This is two 512MB sticks of memory which run at CAS3 latency and are rated at PC4000 (DDR 500 MHz.) The second pair came from Corsair, one of the PC enthusiast's favorite memory brands, model TWINX1024-3200LLPRO. This is two 512MB modules which run at CAS2 latency and are rated at PC3200 (DDR 400 MHz.) Both contenders come with fancy heat-sinks, and the Corsair XMS Pro line now comes with 18 red, orange, and green LEDs on each chip to give you that "Knight Rider" experience.

The first thing I did, after snapping a few pictures, was to benchmark these chips with a myriad of programs. Here are a few charts for your digestion:

AIDA32 is a SiSoft Sandra type of system utility. It gives you a wealth of information on all of the system components, and includes a few very basic benchmarking tools. The memory read and memory write bandwidth test gives us a general, fairly raw, idea of how fast the memory is. As you see, the Corsair XMS just edges out the Kingston HyperX in read tests, and narrowly loses in writing. Here the type of ram is more important than the amount; as you see with the mix of 1.5GB’s of ram, it gives us an average score.

SiSoft Sandra is the industry leading system comparison and information utility out there so it was only natural to run a simple memory benchmark test in Sandra 2004. Here the Corsair takes the narrow lead in both tests. The 1.5GB mix posts a lower score, thus leading me to believe that the absent dual-channel mode was to blame.

Prime95 is yet another good “raw” memory benchmarking tool. Here we see the Kingston and Corsair memory posting almost equal results while the 1.5GB mix benchmark is unclear.

Super PI, a PI decimal digit calculation tool, also has a built-in memory speed benchmarking component. Here the Corsair memory wins out by 1 second in two of the three tests – nothing to write home about. The 1.5GB mix doesn’t lead me to believe that having more memory is ever better.

Finally I got tired of benchmarking using these typical raw-performance calculation tools, so I loaded up Adobe Photoshop CS and ran a few tests of my own. As we can see Photoshop loves RAM, and not the speed of it as much as the amount of it. The 1.5GB mix clearly is the favorite here, with the Kingston barely edging out the Corsair. Strangely enough the base PC2100 Micron memory did better than both of the heavyweights. I think it was some sort of fluke with Photoshop cache – an error on my part.

GL Excess is a no-nonsense, no-frills, and unbiased OpenGL benchmarking tool. Here we see the GL XSMark with each set of memory. The Kingston beats out the Corsair again, with the 1.5GB mix proving to help out the scores just a bit.

I also ran tests in Unreal Tournament 2004 but was having trouble using flyby paths, so the tests were fairly inconsistent. What I noticed was that at low resolution such as 800x600 the Corsair would beat out the Kingston by 20 average FPS. However, at higher resolutions, the Kingston would prevail by the same margin.

I must say, I was quite shocked that the Kingston memory kept up with the more-expensive Corsair XMS Pro set. The Corsair memory is very hyped up, and my expectations were not totally met. Although undoubtedly more stable, at the same speed, it seems to be slightly slower than the HyperX. I’ve yet to try to overclock the Corsair memory, while my attempts at overclocking the Kingston memory on my AMD system were basically disastrous. Just because it’s rated at PC4000 doesn’t mean you can take it anywhere close to there, especially on an AMD system.

Buy what you can afford. Currently both sets are over $300 at retail locations, however the Kingston set can be purchased on eBay for under $300. It doesn’t hold its value as well, nor does the name evoke thoughts of speed and stability, but works almost as well - go figure. For now, I will be keeping the Corsair memory in my system. I guess even I was swayed by the hype.