Patriot Viper 3 Intel Extreme Masters Limited Edition 2133MHz 8GB Review

1. Introduction2. Patriot Viper 3 Intel Extreme Masters Limited Edition 2133MHz Memory3. Configuring the BIOS & Overclocking4. System Configuration5. SiSoft Sandra6. PCMark 77. MaxxMem28. Super Pi9. WinRar10. Closing Thoughts11. View All Pages

Patriot's latest addition to the company's ultra-successful Viper 3 series aims to take a more unique route to the throne of success. The limited edition Intel Extreme Masters kit is, as you guessed with a 2133MHz frequency, built for speed-loving enthusiasts. Quality is at the heart of this kit's design with each module getting special hand-testing treatment to ensure continuous stability.

Equipped with the latest iteration of the sublime Viper heatsink, but this time in a limited edition metallic blue shade, enthusiasm is certain to be created by the modules' attractive appearance. 8GB, 16GB and 32GB kits operating at frequencies of 1600MHz, 1866MHz and 2133MHz, ensure that all segments of the market can be tended to.

Both the Viper Xtreme Division 2 and Viper ‘Black Mamba' 2133MHz kits have garnered our appraisal with 8 and 9 star ratings, respectively. Can the limited edition blue colour scheme of Patriot's serpentine Viper 3 Intel Extreme Masters kit help it gain our recommendation?

Specifications:

• PC3-17000 (2133MHz).
• Timings: 11-11-11-27.
• Voltage: 1.5V.
• XMP Ready.
• Advanced cooling – Viper 3 heatsink.
• Limited edition blue heatsink.
• 100% hand tested.
• Lifetime warranty.

Patriot's basic packaging outlines the memory's special features such as advanced cooling and hand testing. A sticker indicates the kit's capacity and speed. No information about the timings is listed on the box which could dissuade potential buyers from purchasing the kit.

Patriot has gone all out to make its limited edition Intel Extreme Masters kit extremely attractive because, in the end, this memory will be displayed at some high-level events. The striking metallic blue appearance of this kit's Viper 3 heatsink is certain to catch a passer-by's eye.

Another appearance-enhancing feature that we are overjoyed to report is Patriot's decision to use a black PCB. Attractive heatsinks have always been coupled with the Viper series of memory, but for many years they were let down by an ugly green PCB. Not anymore! Patriot deserves credit for making this subtle yet intelligent switch.

At 43mm in height, the Viper 3 Intel Extreme Masters memory sticks offer plenty of room for Patriot to boast about the fact that they are the event's official sponsor.

Air blockage is prevented by grooves which are cut into the memory heatsinks. These channels also act as surface area-boosters allowing effective heat dissipation to take place.

A sticker indicating the frequency, capacity, timings, voltage and model number of Patriot's Viper 3 Intel Extreme Masters Limited Edition memory kit is located on the heatsink.

This sticker makes it easy for overclockers or even general users to set the correct stock frequency without having to visit Patriot's website or rely on the XMP settings.

The exquisite heatsink colouring of Patriot's Viper 3 IEM modules makes them the perfect partner for any motherboard – especially those with hints of blue.

We are using the Asus P8Z77-V motherboard to test today's memory kit. It supports RAM from many manufacturers and gives us a large amount of flexibility to tinker with base clock and timings settings.

We have updated the board to Asus' latest BIOS which is 1504. This BIOS features all of the memory compatibility updates from previous BIOS.

Enabling XMP allowed us to boot directly into the correct frequency, timings and voltage settings for Patriot's memory kit. Our motherboard's ‘auto' settings were correct, but other boards may increase RAM voltages or timings, so we would recommend that you check the settings to avoid system instability.

CPU-Z highlights various timings from the memory. Our Asus P8Z77-V motherboard loaded the 2133MHz XMP profile instantaneously.

Our system validation at stock frequencies can be found here.

We increased the memory voltage to a BIOS setting of 1.7V and relaxed the timings to 14-14-14-33 before aiming to improve the memory frequency. Increasing the motherboard's ‘DRAM Current Capability' to 130% and ‘DRAM Power Phase Control' to Extreme allowed us to push the memory as far as possible.

Increasing the base clock by 1MHz at a time got us up to the 106MHz mark resulting in a 2261MHz memory frequency with complete stability.

With our stable frequency achieved, it was time to see how tight we could get the timings.

The first step was to tighten the kit back to its original 11-11-11-27 timings which proved a step too far with our overclocked frequency. We worked backwards from our slack 14-14-14-33 timings and managed to grasp complete stability at a setting of 12-12-12-27-3T. Decreasing the Cas Latency, RAS Precharge or RAS to CAS Delay any further provided instability during boot and the OS environment.

12-12-12-27 timings are a good achievement for such a high-speed and overclocked memory kit. We were pleased to compromise only a small amount of tightness on the timings for the extra frequency which was attained.

CPU-Z shows the 1130.8MHz DRAM Frequency which provides a Double Data Rate speed of 2261MHz.

You can view our system's validation when overclocked here.

Today we are using an Intel Core i7 2600K processor with our Asus P8Z77-V motherboard.

We will be testing the Patriot Viper 3 Intel Extreme Masters Limited Edition memory kit at:

Stock speed – 2133MHz @ 11-11-11-27-3T @ 1.5V

OC Speed – 2261MHz @ 12-12-12-27-3T @ 1.7V

Test System:

• Processor: Intel Core i7 2600k.
• Motherboard: Asus P8Z77-V.
• Cooler: Prolimatech Megahalems.
• Graphics card: Radeon HD 4870 1GB with Arctic Cooling Accelero Twin Turbo Pro.
• Power supply: Corsair TX650.
• Storage drives: 128GB Kingston V100 (OS), 1TB Samsung F3, 300GB Western Digital Caviar.
• OS: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit.

Asus P8Z77-V system comparison memory:

• 8GB ‘generic' 1600MHz CL9.
• 8GB ‘generic' 1333MHz CL9.

NOTE: We haven’t tested many memory kits on this Z77-based test system, so we felt it would be worth including results from our  Dual Channel Z77 system featuring the 3770K processor. Obviously these results shouldn't be used as a direct comparison, but more to highlight a wider overview of performance levels between the various Intel platforms.

Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H Z77 comparison system:

Processor: Intel Core i7 3770k.
Motherboard: Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H motherboard.
Cooler: Arctic Cooling Freezer 13.
Power Supply: ADATA 1200W.
Optical Drive: Asus BluRay Drive.
Chassis: Cooler Master Cosmos 2.
Monitors: Dell U3011, 3x Ilyama ProLite E2472HDD.
Boot Drive: Kingston SSDNow V+200 90GB.
Storage Drive: Patriot 240GB Wildfire.

Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H Z77 system comparison memory:

• 8GB Patriot Viper Xtreme Division 2 2133mhz
• 8GB G.Skill TridentX 2400mhz

Software:

• SiSoft Sandra
• PCMark 7
• MaxxMem 2
• Super Pi
• WinRar

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’s) 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

Memory bandwidth results in Sandra are typical for the kit's given speed. The increased frequency achieved by overclocking provided a measurable improvement to the Viper 3 IEM's result.

High speed memory renders excellent performance in the Sandra Cache Bandwidth test.

Tight timings and a high frequency are required to achieve a good result in the Sandra Cache & Memory Latency test. Patriot's 2133MHz Viper 3 Intel Extreme Masters Limited Edition RAM soundly outperforms the generic 1600MHz and 1333MHz CL9 memory kits.

PCMark 7 includes 7 PC tests for Windows 7, combining more than 25 individual workloads covering storage, computation, image and video manipulation, web browsing and gaming. Specifically designed to cover the full range of PC hardware from netbooks and tablets to notebooks and desktops, PCMark 7 offers complete PC performance testing for Windows 7 for home and business use.

A score of 4004 in PCMark 7 is respectable for our test system. The Viper 3 IEM kit achieves good memory-related scores thanks to its high frequency.

MaxxMem2 PreView is a handy, free program to rate memory performance. It can be downloaded over here.

The 2133MHz Viper 3 memory offers the best overall MaxxMem2 performance when overclocked. The 2400MHz G.Skill TridentX and 2133MHz Patriot Viper Xtreme Division 2 kits achieve slightly better memory copy results; whereas the overclocked Viper 3 kit shows chart-topping performance in both the memory read and memory write tests.

A healthy latency decrease was provided by the higher frequency of our 2261MHz 12-12-12-27 overclock.

Super Pi is used by a huge audience, particularly to check stability when overclocking processors and memory. If a system is able to calculate PI to the 2 millionth place after the decimal without mistake, it is considered to be stable in regards to RAM and CPU. This program will also allow us to outline performance gains created by overclocked CPU and RAM frequencies.

Super PI loves fast RAM – as proven by the above chart. Our 1333MHz and 1600MHz generic memory kits can't keep pace with the lightning-fast 2133MHz Patriot Viper 3 IEM sticks.

WinRar is one of the most popular archive manager programs available. It can backup your data and reduce the size of email attachments, decompress RAR, ZIP and other files downloaded from Internet and create new archives in RAR and ZIP file format. You can try WinRAR before buy, its trial version is available in downloads.

WinRar's built in benchmark and hardware test can help us indicate performance gains experienced by overclocking our memory.

Perhaps the most meaningful of today's benchmarks, WinRar proves that high-speed memory does indeed have a distinct performance advantage in real-world situations… such as archiving and extracting items. Overclocking the Patriot memory provided a performance boost of around 1%. We'll let you decide upon the importance of that figure.

The Patriot Viper 3 Intel Extreme Masters Limited Edition 8GB 2133MHz is a fantastic memory kit. The limited edition blue heatspreaders are attractive, a black PCB has been used and a high-frequency XMP profile make this kit an excellent choice for speed-craving gamers and enthusiasts alike.

Given the already very high speed of Patriot's 2133MHz kit, we didn't expect to overclock it much further.

We were pleased to attain a frequency boost of 128MHz with only a slight compromise to the timings' configuration. As always, overclocking results are system specific, but a 128MHz boost on an already very fast kit is what we would consider to be worthwhile and easily achievable.

One problem with the Patriot Viper 3 Intel Extreme Masters Limited Edition memory kit is the 43mm heatspreader height. They may create an attractive appearance, but the memory is definitely going to interfere with large CPU coolers from the likes of Noctua and Phanteks, dependent upon its positioning.

We would like Patriot to use an equally attractive heatspreader design that doesn't cause interference issues.

At a price of £47.99 from Overclockers, the Patriot Viper 3 Intel Extreme Masters Limited Edition memory kit offers excellent value for money. It is one of the cheaper 2133MHz kits available and is backed by Patriot's high-class quality measures such as 100% hand testing and a lifetime warranty.

Patriot's Viper 3 IEM 2133MHz memory sits directly in the centre of price-war territory for 2133MHz 8GB kits. At £47.99, the gorgeous heatspreaders and limited edition ‘wow factor' combined with excellent performance and solid reliability are certainly valuable characteristics – ones which are worthy of swaying a purchase in the favour of Patriot's Viper 3 Intel Extreme Masters Limited Edition memory kit.

Pros:

• Excellent performance.
• Frequency can be increased.
• Very attractive kit.
• Black PCB.

Cons:

• Tall heatspreaders will cause interference issues.

KitGuru says: A high-quality memory kit with an attractive design and limited edition ‘wow factor'.

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