Kingston HyperX H20 6GB DDR-2000 Review

1. Introduction2. Kingston HyperX H20 and the WC kit3. Testing Methodology & Overclocking4. SiSoft Sandra5. SuperPi6. WinRar Multithreaded Processing7. KitGuru Photoshop Benchmark 1(4)8. Closing Thoughts9. View All Pages

Kingston can sometimes be overlooked in enthusiast circles, which is a shame as they have some fantastic solutions on the market. They recently announced several new memory products and today we are looking at their high end HyperX H20 memory modules.

The HyperX H20 are targeted at demanding gamers and the overclocking audience who love to tweak and push their systems to the limit. They are currently being sold in three flavours. 2000mhz and 2133mhz 4GB kits for AMD and Intel Core i3/i5 and a 2000mhz 6GB kit for Core i7 1366 slot configurations.

Today we are looking at the tri channel 6GB DDR3 2000mhz kit which retails in the UK for around £130 inc vat. The H20 series, as the name would suggest is designed to be watercooled to offer additional overclocking headroom with improved temperatures. You can use them without a watercooling kit, but it somewhat defeats the purpose of this specific design.

• Model: KHX2000C9AD3W1K3/6GX
• Module Size: 6GB kit (2GB x 3)
• Package: 240-pin DIMM
• DDR3-2000
• 9-10-9 Timings @ 1.65V
• X.M.P Profiles
• Lifetime Warranty

The H20 modules arrive in a long plastic container with Kingston branding on the front.

Inside they are clipped into the plastic surround to offer good protection during shipping. It isn't the most fancy packaging, but it is effective.

The modules are stunning in design with a black shroud over the blue headspreader.

The design is fantastic, a chrome brass water pipe clamp held in place by two screws with the aluminum shroud. As the cool water is passed along the pipe system, it removes heat.

The waterpipe is 11 cm long and is chrome plated with two 6mm fixed barbs at either end of the pipe. This tubing is rather unusual in size as most are 8mm or 13mm in diameter. Thankfully our friends at Yoyotech and Aquatuning supplied the kit today.

The kit contained all we needed, a reservoir, pump, cabling, fittings and radiator.

Yoyotech supplied all the products from the Phobya range and Aquatuning supplied the tubing and fittings needed to complete our build. The Phoyba Balancer 150 black nickel, Phoyba G-Changer 120, Phoyba Nano-G 120mm PWM controlled silent fan (red) and a Phoyba DC12-260 12 Volt Pump.

The Phoyba kit is well built and all the necessary screws and fittings are supplied in each of the packages. Anyone who has assembled a watercooling kit will have no problems.

Here are some more pictures of the watercooling kit:

Today we are using a Core 920 based system with an Asus Rampage III Extreme.

Kingston HyperX H20 6GB kit

Test System
Processor: Intel Core i7 920
Motherboard: Asus Rampage III Extreme
Power Supply: Corsair AX1200
Chassis: Bitfenix Colossus
Graphics: eVGA GTX460 FTW

Technical Monitoring and Test Equipment:
Thermal Diodes
Raytek Laser Temp Gun 3i LSRC/MT4 Mini Temp

Software:
SiSoft Sandra
CPUz
Prime95
SuperPi
WinRar
Adobe Photoshop CS5 64Bit @ KitGuru Script

The HyperX H20 support Intel XMP (memory profiles) which makes basic overclocking a one step process. These modules have two memory profiles built into the design, one for 1866mhz and the other for 2000mhz. When these profiles are enabled they adjust memory timings as well as CPU clock multipler, bus speed (BCLK), UnCore Clock (QPI/DRAM) and DRAM Voltage.

Selecting 2000mhz proved no issue and we were able to push to 2130mhz with timings of 8-9-8-28 at reference voltage. Room ambient was 24c.

We tested the Kingston H20 modules in two states: passively cooled and then with watercooling. Our results show a 3c drop when idle and a 7c drop when overclocked … significant improvements.

We then decided to relax our timings a little to see how far we could push the H20 memory.

We managed to achieve 2350mhz after loosening the settings to 9-10-9. Let us check out some performance figures now.

SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software.

Sandra is a (girl) name of Greek origin that means “defender”, “helper of mankind”. We think that’s quite fitting.

It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc.

Native ports for all major operating systems are available:

• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x86)
• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x64)
• Windows 2003/R2, 2008/R2* (IA64)
• Windows Mobile 5.x (ARM CE 5.01)
• Windows Mobile 6.x (ARM CE 5.02)

All major technologies are supported and taken advantage of:

• SMP – Multi-Processor
• MC – Multi-Core
• SMT/HT – Hyper-Threading
• MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, AVX, FMA – Multi-Media instructions
• GPGPU, DirectX, OpenGL – Graphics
• NUMA – Non-Uniform Memory Access
• AMD64/EM64T/x64 – 64-bit extensions to x86
• IA64 – Intel* Itanium 64-bit

A final result of 35.46 GB/s @2350mhz  is an incredible result from the Kingston modules, rising from 23.12 GB/s at 1333mhz. A massive increase in memory bandwidth.

Super PI is used by overclockers across the globe and we felt for this particular memory review that it was an interesting addition to the overall suite. We used the XS mod version.

The improvements scale with memory speed and we save 1.2 seconds when moving from 1333mhz to 2350mhz, significant for this particular test.

Winrar is a useful ‘real world’ test to analyse system performance, including memory bandwidth. We create a custom folder with files of multiple sizes inside and then measure performance in kilobytes per second.

At 1333mhz our score was 5123 kb/s which increased to 7213 kb/s at 2350mhz, again significant improvements at the higher clock speeds.

When I was in charge of DriverHeaven I wrote a scripted benchmark which was not only used to help users ascertain system specific performance levels but was useful in reviews to accurately measure performance in key areas. Leading tech sites such as Madshrimps, Hardware Canucks, Benchmark Reviews and Hardocp used my benchmark in their reviews also.

This version of the script has been thoroughly tested on Adobe Photoshop CS5 and CS4 and is compatible with Photoshop 7. It is important to document however that different versions of Photoshop give different end results. Adobe have been fine tuning the program over the years and enhancing specific filters and algorithms for better performance (some filters were rewritten during the CS2 time period). This means ultimately that comparing times with users running other versions of Photoshop is not going to give consistent results.

Lower times are better

KitGuru PS Bench 1(4)	1333mhz 8-8-8	2000mhz 9-9-9	2350mhz 9-10-9
1. Texturiser (1)	1.8	1.6	1.6
2. CMYK	1.7	1.5	1.5
3. RGB	1.5	1.4	1.4
4. Ink outlines	29.4	28.1	28.0
5. Dust & Stratches	3.5	3.2	3.1
6. Watercolor	25.9	25.8	25.6
7. Texturiser (2)	2.0	1.9	1.9
8. Stained Glass	24.3	23.6	23.5
9. Mosiac Tiles	14.3	13.9	13.8
10. Extrude	157.8	157.4	157.1
11. Rough Pastels	12.9	12.7	12.4
12. Smart Blur	98.7	98.3	98.1
13. Underpainting	36.6	36.4	36.1
14. Mosiac Tiles	15.0	14.7	14.5
15. Spherize	3.9	3.5	3.4
16. Palette Knife	23.5	23.0	22.9
17. Sponge	43.5	41.9	41.7
18. Smudge Stick	14.1	13.5	13.3
Total:	510.4	502.4	499.9

At 1333mhz, we recorded a time of 510.4 seconds which dropped by 8 seconds when we pushed the memory to 2000mhz. This was further reduced by 2.5 seconds when we increased to our final speed of 2350mhz. These are impressive results and show the potential of the memory bandwidth in a more serious environment.

The Kingston HyperX H20 Kit is a class leading product and one that will certainly appease the performance minded enthusiast yearning for an upgrade. The kit is easy to set up out of the box via Intel XMP memory profiles, however we managed to tweak the clocks to 2350mhz at 9-10-9 timings. This is the highest we have ever achieved with 2000mhz rated memory.

While the Kingston H20 memory will happily run 24/7 without watercooling, adding liquid does help lower temperatures (by 7c in our case) when loaded …  noticeable improvements to squeeze every possible mhz from the memory.

The H20 kit delivers staggering levels of bandwidth and they have the added bonus of looking fantastic, presented via a sharp black outer jacket with the traditional HyperX blue heatspreader underneath. The heatspreader design is slimline which means there will be no fitting issues on any motherboard.

The only aspect of this product that we would like to see improved would be the support. You are left with very little guidance as to the tubing sizes and perhaps Kingston could consider some documentation with support from various manufacturers. Even adapters for standard tubing sizes would be something they could roll out with the next revision. A minor point, but one which could cause some potential headache to a customer.

The price point considering the performance is very healthy – you can buy this 6GB kit for £130 inc vat which we feel is very competitive. Yoyotech order these specifically on request, so feel free to contact them directly (they can also get the 4GB kit).

KitGuru says: They look great, deliver huge levels of performance and will surely satisfy the demands of overclockers and performance users.

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