Kingston has been in the memory business for a long time now, in fact they are probably one of the longest established memory manufacturers. Well before I was into computers, some 18 years ago now Kingston began testing all their memory modules, at the time no other manufacturer tested 100% of their memory. This helped Kingston establish a strong reputation that they have successfully carried on to this day. Amazingly, while Legion Hardware has been around for 8 years now we have never had the pleasure of testing a Kingston product.

Of course I have purchased and owned many Kingston memory modules in my time, though I have never used any of their performance memory. That was until a week ago, when I began testing the Kingston HyperX PC2-6400 2GB dual-channel memory kit on our latest Core 2 Duo platform. The exact kit that we have here today is the “KHX6400D2LLK2/2GN” which is designed to support Nvidia SLI systems. This being the case we decided to throw this memory at the recently reviewed ASUS Striker Extreme motherboard.

This is a low latency kit and while it is programmed to work at the 800MHz DDR2 JEDEC specification of CAS 5-5-5-15 2T with 1.9v, the timings can be manually improved. Kingston guarantees that this memory can operate at CAS 4-4-4-12 2T with just 2.0v of power. These are quite good timings for DDR2-800 memory and should allow the modules to be quite flexible when it comes time to overclock them. However, after further inspection we realized that the Kingston HyperX KHX6400D2LLK2/2GN modules use Elpida chips, meaning they probably will not overclock very well.

Nevertheless, being performance based memory from the “HyperX” family, the KHX6400D2LLK2/2GN modules feature attractive blue heat spreaders. While heat spreaders are not entirely necessary for DDR2-800 memory working with just 2.0v, they will ensure that the memory remains at a safe operating temperature. Furthermore, while we have been put off in the past by memory from OCZ for example, that have very poorly attached heat spreaders, I am impressed with how well Kingston have installed their heat spreaders. A very fine piece of double sided tap has been applied to the heat spreader first and then Kingston has stuck them over the memory chips.

Finishing off the installation are two strong retaining clips designed to ensure that the heat spreaders never move or damage the modules when users press down on them to install the modules. Furthermore this method also improves contact, allowing the heat spreaders to remove heat from all the memory chips. The PCB itself is still green which is a shame as blue would have looked that little bit better, though overall the modules do look impressive. Priced at around $240 US the HyperX KHX6400D2LLK2/2GN is not the cheapest 2GB dual-channel memory kit going around, but it is fairly well priced.

Given that 2GB DDR2-800 memory kits start around $200 US, with the majority of low-latency kits costing upward of $240 US, we recon Kingston are pretty spot on with their pricing. The Corsair CAS 4-4-4-12 2T kit starts around $250 US so the Kingston pricing is very competitive. So the price seems to be pretty well spot on and they certainly look the part. The next big question is of course how well do they perform? Well without wasting anymore time, let’s move on to the next section of this review where we put these modules to the test using our nForce 680i SLI system!

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