Corsair Vengeance 12GB DDR3 Memory Kit review

Final Words & Conclusion

Power users need power products -- I already know a handful of people that are running 12GB in their X58 / Core i7 based PC. Do they need that much capacity ? No of course not. Six Gigabyte for a platform shown today is the norm for the performance enthusiast on X58/Core i7, any memory size above it, is very hard to justify.

However, I'll say it again ... power users need power products. A couple of years ago, two maybe even one GB memory was the norm. Look at where we are now. We have OSes that are memory hogs, games and applications that take a lot of that memory budget and that trend is ongoing. I suspect that in the next year or two 8GB for dual-channel is going to be the new norm, because as you know it... memory helps a lot. It is a quick fix for performance issues as you do not want that OS of yours to start swapping to your storage solution.

That rule applies especially with applications that cache a lot, take Photoshop for example, or what about transcoding video or 3d content creation ?

Next to that, power users like to do more than your average PC aficionado as well e.g. multi-task. While watching a video, maybe transcoding a little something-something, burn a CD whilst downloading some content. It is exactly for that kind of end-user where we could justify 12GB of memory.

As a product all by itself the Vengeance memory is definitely impressive. Surely it's not the fastest CL memory your money can get you, but we've been evangelizing for a while now, you are far better of with CAS 8/9 memory and a larger quantity memory kit than say a 3GB CAS7 2000 MHz kit.

And you know what, Corsair did it well. This is high-density memory that still runs CAS9 at 1600 MHz. In fact there's some tweaking potential to be found here as well. We ran 1866 MHz just fine and with a little voltage tweaking we have no doubt you'll reach 1900-2000 MHz as well. But hey, why not stick at 1600 MHz, go for absolutely as advertised low voltage stability while your memory bandwidth runs already very high. Really that 1600 MHz clock frequency (effective data rate) is more than enough for your overall performance. As cool as it sounds, you will not noticeably gain a lot by going higher in frequency or timings, trust me on that. So why not invest in more memory?

And that's where this article conclusion is going to end. We can hardly justify the additional 6GB of memory performance wise, but you just know it's good and in the future will help you. The Corsair Vengeance 12GB PC3-12800 1600MHz DDR3 DIMM Memory Kit will cost you just over 200 USD. In EURO we spotted this kit for € 168,- that's 14 EUR per GB. So yeah, we feel this is a very wise investment to make. With X58 and Core i7 you are already going big and grand, so why not adapt your RAM memory strategy to that as well ? It's affordable and kicks ass.

You can seek the kit tested today under SKU code CMZ12GX3M3A1600C9, highly recommended as you are receiving a lot for your money alright.

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