Corsair Vengeance Pro 2,400MHz 16GB review

Corsair has designed the new Vengeance Pro series to work alongside the new 4th Gen Core architecture from Intel. Obviously that doesn't preclude it from being quality RAM if you're rocking an older Intel DDR3-based platform, or even one from AMD.

Following on from Corsair's successful Vengeance series, the Pro range is also aimed at overclockers, with integrated circuits (ICs) selected for their potential performance.

At the time of writing, Corsair has made sure the Pro kits are available in enough speeds and capacities to keep all but the most awkward of enthusiasts happy - from the entry-level 1,600MHz modules all the way up to the flagship 2,933MHz ones, with pretty much every popular frequency in between.

Those top-end modules will need the support of a Haswell processor to get up to that blazing-fast speed, but as a sign of things to come, Corsair was also showing off some 3,200MHz Vengeance Pro sticks at this year's Computex show.

Pick a colour

If the choice of speeds and capacities isn't enough, there's also a rainbow of colours. For those interested in such things there's red, blue, silver or gold heat sink trim, so matching any particular motherboard should be pretty straightforward. You know, for those to whom such things really matter. That said, I know Gigabyte loves the fact that the blue modules match its motherboard trim.

If you're wondering if the modules will fit under that lumbering great third-party CPU cooler you've bought, they'll need around 44mm of ground clearance. As the SPD (serial presence detect) data of the modules is 1,333MHz (9-9-9-24), that's what our Asus test board's auto detection thought the memory should run at. All praise XMP, then, for immediately giving us our 2,400MHz with a 10-12-12-31 latency.

There's a lesson here: always take the time to go into the BIOS and double check to make sure that the memory is running at the correct speed.

So how about overclocking? Keeping the overclocking tuner set to the XMP profile option, the next memory speed offered up by our motherboard was 2,600MHz, which turned out to be a bridge too far for our modules - and the motherboard refused to boot. Back to the drawing board.

We still wanted to see what the memory was capable of with the minimum of tinkering in the BIOS so, with that in mind, we switched into manual mode and only altered the BCLK frequency, raising it to 105.5. The memory timings (10-12-12-3) and voltage (1.65V) were left as standard, and in this guise we got our modules to run stably at 2,532MHz, which is a decent 132MHz over the advertised speed of 2,400MHz. Any more adjustments resulted in a non-booting board.

Benchmarks

The closest competition for the latest Corsair memory is the chunky Beast kit from Kingston. They both tap out at the same overclocked frequency, and trade bandwidth and gaming performance wins. But it's the reliability of the Corsair's overclock that makes us warm more to these new sticks than the otherwise impressive Kingston modules.

Memory bandwidth performance
Sisoft Sandra: Gigabytes per second: Higher is better
CORSAIR VENGEANCE PRO @ 2,400MHZ: 30
KINGSTON HYPERX BEAST @ 2,400MHZ: 29
CRUCIAL SPORT XT @ 1,866MHZ: 24

Gaming performance
Batman: AC: Frames per second: Higher is better
CORSAIR VENGEANCE PRO @ 2,400MHZ: 133
KINGSTON HYPERX BEAST @ 2,400MHZ: 135
CRUCIAL SPORT XT @ 1,866MHZ: 125

Overclocking performance
Sisoft Sandra: Gigabytes per second: Higher is better
CORSAIR VENGEANCE PRO @ 2,400MHZ: 32
KINGSTON HYPERX BEAST @ 2,400MHZ: 27
CRUCIAL SPORT XT @ 1,866MHZ: 28

Verdict

The ol' Vengeance line was a success for Corsair, and the latest Pro products show no sign of dropping the ball. The potential of Corsair's new memory family is evident in the extent of its product matrix, and if the demo we saw at Computex is anything to go by, the promise of even faster speeds is just around the corner.