G.Skill TridentX 8GB 2400mhz Memory Review (Z77 platform)

1. Introduction2. G.Skill TridentX 8GB 2400mhz Memory3. G.Skill TridentX 8GB 2400mhz Memory (Super High Res Gallery)4. Configuring the Bios & Overclocking5. System Configuration6. SiSoft Sandra7. PCMark 78. 3DStudio Max 20119. MaxxMem210. Closing Thoughts11. View All Pages

The Z77 platform has been in full flow now for almost a month and Intel partners have been releasing a variety of motherboards for the 3rd generation of Intel Core processors. Recently we reviewed a prototype of the latest Kingston HyperX Genesis 2666mhz memory and today we are looking at a more affordable high performance offering from G.Skill. The TridentX 8GB 2400mhz kit is available for less than £100 in the UK today.

G.Skill have been extremely active in the last year, releasing some of the finest memory kits for the enthusiast audience while maintaining extremely competitive pricing. They have also been focusing on pushing performance to the limits, while breaking overclocking records.

The TridentX 2800MHz 16GB kit for instance has successfully achieved DDR3 3320MHz speed, when paired up with LN2 … we posted about this a short while ago. Sure, this isn't practical for the end user, but it certainly helps G.Skill to build up a reputation within enthusiast circles.

Is the G.Skill TridentX 8GB memory an ideal partner for a new Z77 system build?

G.Skill package the TridentX memory inside a touch blister pack as shown above. The memory is predominately black with red accenting.

The back of the packaging explains that the memory is designed for extreme overclockers and PC enthusiasts. It also highlights a welcome lifetime warranty.

Inside, is a sticker which can be adhered to your case, if you like to showcase manufacturer components.

The G.Skill TridentX memory is protected underneath a black heatspreader and along the top is a red ‘ridge' which protrudes a little above the PCB.

For those people concerned about fitting issues with oversized CPU coolers, it is worth pointing out that this top section of the headspreader can be removed.

Simply remove two screws and slide along for removal. It is a nice touch, but we aren't sure this red section is actually necessary at all.

The memory is shipped with a ‘F3-2400C10D-8GTX' branding along the top of the sticker. The timings are 10-12-12-31 @ 1.65v for 2,400mhz operation. These are 4GB sticks, for a total of 8GB in Dual channel.

On this page we present some super high resolution images of the product taken with the 24.5MP Nikon D3X camera and 24-70mm ED lens. These will take much longer to open due to the dimensions, especially on slower connections. If you use these pictures on another site or publication, please credit Kitguru.net as the owner/source.

We aren't using Liquid Nitrogen today as we don't think anyone reading this review will be either. We are however using the Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H motherboard which we reviewed a few days ago.

The bios defaulted to 1333mhz, so we had to manually select Profile 1 as shown in the screenshot above. The system rebooted without an issue.

We double checked the timings in the DRAM Timing Selectable menu. 10-12-12-31 was highlighted, which is correct according to the XMP profile.

System validation at these speeds is available over here.

Above CPUz screenshots of the G.Skill TridentX memory running at 2400mhz. The SPD information shows a maximum rated speed of 1143mhz (2286mhz effective), at 10-13-13-33 timings, although G.Skill are clearly pushing it much higher than these specifications.

We tried to manually select a 2666mhz memory setting, but the system wouldn't post, even when we loosened the timings to 12-12-12-40. We also tried to overclock the memory by increasing the BCLK. We had a little more success this way….

We managed to push the memory to 2520mhz at the same 10-12-12-31 timings. Any higher and we would run into stability problems. It was also possible to increase this to 2600mhz, but the timings had to relaxed to 12-12-12 which negated any performance improvements.

You can check system validation at 2520mhz with timings of 10-12-12-31, over here.

Today we are using the latest Intel Core i7 3770k processor with the Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H motherboard.

Processor: Intel Core i7 3770k
Motherboard: Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H motherboard
Cooler: Arctic Cooling Freezer 13
Memory: G.Skill TridentX 8GB 2400mhz
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.

Comparison memory:
4GB ‘generic’ 1333mhz memory @ 9-9-9-24.
Kingston HyperX Genesis 2666mhz @ 11-13-13-30

Comparison memory system:
Processor: Intel Core i7 3770k
Motherboard: Asus ROG Maximus V Gene Z77
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.

We also wanted to include some results from Topower Black Edition memory, running at 1,600mhz @ 9-9-9 timings, on the following system

CPU: Intel Core i7 2700k
Cooler: Thermaltake Frio OCK
Motherboard: Asus P8P67 Deluxe
PSU: ADATA 1200W
Graphics: Sapphire HD6950 Flex Edition
Chassis: Thermaltake Level 10 GT
Operating System: Windows 7 64 bit Enterprise
Monitor: Dell U2410

NOTE: We haven’t tested many memory kits on the P67/Z68 platform in recent months, so we felt it would be worth including results from our high end Quad Channel X79 system featuring the 3960X EE processor. Obviously this shouldn’t be used as a direct comparison, but more to highlight a wider overview of performance levels between the various Intel platforms.

Comparison system:

Processor: Intel i7 3960X EE @ 4.4ghz
Motherboard: Asus Rampage IV Extreme
Cooler: Antec H20 920
Graphics Card: Nvidia GTX590
Power Supply: Enermax Platimax 1200W
Optical Drive: Asus BluRay Drive
Chassis: Lian Li PC-A77FR Aluminium Red Full Tower Case
Monitors: Dell U3011, 3x Ilyama ProLite E2472HDD
Boot Drive: Patriot WildFire 120GB
Secondary Drive: 1TB Samsung

Comparison memory:
Kingston HyperX 2400mhz
8GB Kingston HyperX 2,400mhz
16GB G.Skill 2400mhz
8GB Corsair Dominator GT 2400mhz
16GB GSkill Ripjaws Z 2133mhz
32GB Corsair Vengeance 1600mhz

Software:
SiSoft Sandra
PcMark 7
MaxxMem 2
Super Pi
AIDA 64.

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

The system scored a little less than the 2666mhz Genesis from Kingston, but it was close enough thanks to the slightly tighter timings from the G.Skill TridentX. The Quad Channel kits lead this benchmark by a significant margin.

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.

The system scores 5,402 points overall which is healthy.

V2011 is the first release of 3DStudio Max to fully support the Windows 7 operating system. This is a professional level tool that many people use for work purposes and our test will show any possible differences between board design today.

Autodesk 3ds Max Design 2011 software offers compelling new techniques to help bring designs to life by aggregating data, iterating ideas, and presenting the results.

Streamlined, more intelligent data exchange workflows and innovative new modeling and visualization tools help significantly increase designers’ creativity and productivity, enabling them to better explore, validate, and communicate the stories behind their designs.

Major new features:

• Slate: A node based material editor.
• Quicksilver: Hardware renderer with multithreaded rendering engine that utilizes both CPU and GPU.
• Extended Graphite Modeling Toolset
• 3ds Max Composite: A HDRI-capable compositor based on Autodesk Toxik.
• Viewport Canvas toolset for 3D and 2D texture painting directly in the viewport
• Object Painting: use 3D geometry as ‘brushes’ on other geometry
• Character Animation Toolkit (CAT): now integrated as part of the base package
• Autodesk Material Library: Over 1200 new photometrically accurate shaders
• Additional file format support: includes native support for Sketchup, Inventor
• FBX file linking
• Save to Previous Release (2010)

We created a new 8200×3200 scene and recorded the time for the hardware to finalise the render.

Very closely matched against the Kingston HyperX Genesis 2666mhz memory, only a single second slower.

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

At these speeds the memory scores well in MaxxMem, although the Quad Channel kits are literally miles ahead in the memory read test.

The TridentX 2400mhz 8GB kit is another fantastic product from G.Skill, they certainly seem to be leading the enthusiast memory sector in recent months. This high performance memory paired up well with the Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H motherboard and we experienced no issues achieving rock solid performance at 2,400mhz.

We attempted to overclock the memory by overriding the profile to 2,666mhz but we couldn't get a stable post at these speeds, even when we relaxed the timings and raised voltage a little more, outside Intel specifications. Increasing the BCLK was slightly more successful and we managed to increase the memory speeds to 2520mhz before instability would occur. We didn't need to relax the timings either, maintaining the same 10-12-12 default settings.

There are so many memory kits right now on the market that much of the purchasing decision has to be based on the price. Novatech are stocking this memory at £99.98 and Overclockers have it on an offer for £95.99.

Currently G.Skill are offering a RipJawsZ 16GB 1600mhz kit for £89.99, which delivers double the memory capacity of our review product today, for around £10 less.

This raises a valid question – is it really worth paying the premium for 2,400mhz memory right now? We would say that if you use your machine for 3D rendering and video encoding that the higher specified memory will deliver a noticeable performance benefit. For a pure gaming PC, I would opt for a higher capacity (but slower) kit right now. It all depends on your desires and demands.

Regardless, this G.Skill TridentX 2,400mhz memory offers fantastic performance at a relatively modest price point. I am old enough to remember when an ultra slow 2GB DDR memory kit cost well over £200. There has never been a better time to buy quality memory.

Pros:

• Competitive pricing.
• great heatspreader design with removable top fin.
• overclocks past 2,500mhz at the same timings.

Cons:

• Compared to 1,600mhz memory it is still expensive.
• I don't really see a need for the red top fin on the heatspreader.

Kitguru says: Another great memory kit from G.Skill, one of the most aggressive memory companies on the market.

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