When it comes to choosing RAM for your system, there can be an overwhelming number of choices. There are many manufacturers that make RAM, and each of them have many models to choose from.
But not all RAM is created equal, and the people over at Patriot Memory know this. Patriot is a big player in the industry, and that’s why I was more than happy to find out Patriot wanted to sponsor an article from us.
The kit we’re testing will be the Patriot Viper LED (White) DDR-3200MHz dual-channel kit. With this kit, you’ll get two 8GB single-rank sticks of RAM rated to be overclocked at 3200MHz.
These sticks of RAM only have chips on one side of them, meaning the performance will be slower than that of RAM using dual-rank, or chips on both sides to share the load. On the other hand, this allows for less expensive RAM; we can get behind that so long as the RAM is actually potent.
Specs – XMP and timings
This kit includes two built-in XMP profiles to get you going with your overclocking. Remember, anything over 2133MHz of DDR4 is technically an overclock. Even if it’s advertised as higher (such as our 3200MHz kit), it means it’s rated to be overclocked to that number.
XMP table
| Speed | Timing | |
|---|---|---|
| XMP Profile 1 | 2933 MHz | 16-18-18-36 |
| XMP Profile 2 | 3200 MHz | 16-18-18-36 |
Testing the timing for the rated speeds of 3200 MHz proved easy, as 16-18-18-36 (seen in the above image on the far right) worked great with no issues. I ran this kit at that speed and timing over the weekend while I used my computer for my day to day and gaming activities and had no issues whatsoever.
Remember, you want the CAS latency to be as low as possible. The CAS Latency of 16– which means the RAM respond every 16 clock cycles– that we were able to run with this kit was great for what this RAM is.
Other kits in this range can easily be 18 and over causing the RAM to respond much slower. That might not sound like a big difference, but sense cycles happen so fast a difference of 2 in your CAS latency score can result in a huge change while in use.
If you’re not really familiar with what we’re saying here, then check out our article about RAM speed and XMP profiles.
Tuning, Testing, and the Benchmarks
To run our tests, we used the following system setup:
- MSI Pro Gaming Carbon X370
- Ryzen 1700
- Radeon RX 570
- Patriot 16GB RAM kit
We tested the RAM using both XMP profiles: XMP1 2933MHz and XMP2 3200MHz (which seemed to perform best). We tried testing the RAM at 3600MHz, but our early-model Ryzen setup has issues with higher RAM speeds and couldn’t get it stable, but reports indicate it should be able to reach 3600MHz with a little tuning on newer chipsets.
Regardless, even at 3200MHz, this kit did very well in our testing.
We used Sandra Benchmarking from SiSoftware to run our benchmarks for bandwidth and latency. This will let us know how much throughput the RAM can handle, as well as how long it takes to respond.
As we can see, both XMP profiles are pretty evenly matched when it comes to bandwidth with 3200MHz coming out just ahead with 34GB/s of bandwidth (higher is better). This is how much throughput it can handle
And for latency, 3200MHz comes out ahead, being slightly faster than the 2933MHz profile, coming in at 63.1ns (lower is better). This is how long it takes the RAM to respond to a command.
When it comes to gaming and FPS, it still keeps up, giving great performance numbers in both 1440p and 1080p gaming, making this a great kit if you’re thinking about picking it up for gaming.
We used the Unigine Heaven Benchmark software to measure FPS in both 1080p and 1440p.
Obviously, the two profiles don’t offer a profound difference in these use cases.
Final Thoughts
I had a pleasant time working with this kit of RAM for both my day-to-day tasks and some light gaming. Honestly, I didn’t notice much of a difference between this and my 32GB G.Skill kit that I usually use in my system.
This kit is fast, dual channel RAM with the added bonus of style at a good value price. The white LED strip on the top adds a nice touch of aesthetic. Although I wish there was just a couple more LEDs in each strip, as the diffuser still shows the break, allowing dark and light spots to show through.
Overall, this is very nice RAM that I would recommend to anyone looking to spice the look of their system up while still having nice, fast RAM at a value.
And a big thanks to https://www.viper.patriotmemory.com/viperleddram for sponsoring this post and sending us this awesome kit.
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