Galax HOF OC Lab Water Cooling 4400 MHz CL19 review - Specifications and features

Specifications and features

The HOF OC Lab Water Cooling RAM marketing info:

“Galax has now released its limited-edition HOF OC Lab water-cooled memory. Which not only provides really impressive performance but looks good while doing so. The speeds of the memory range from 4000 MHz to 4600 MHz. The DDR4-4000 8GBx2 kit is available for $385, the DDR4-4400 8GBx2 kit costs  $360, and the DDR4-4600 8GBx2 kit is going to set you back $430. These are converted prices, so they could be a bit different in the USA but keeping in mind that these are limited edition kits and are for water-cooling, they are going to be pretty expensive. The water-cooling block sits on the RAM and features RGB lighting so that you can sync the lights with the rest of your build and peripherals that support the feature. The RAM supports XMP 2.0, which can be enabled in the BIOS settings. The RAM can also be overclocked with a click of a button. As the Galax HOF OC Lab water-cooled memory is a limited-edition product, you get a special VIP card that mentions the number of the product on it.”

That’s it with the marketing stuff here, so now we can proceed to the practical portion of this write-up. Let’s see what we have under the hood. First up is Thaiphoon Burner, a perfect utility for checking the primary data on a RAM die. According to this program, the chips that are used here are from Samsung B-Die. Will they provide headroom for some overclocking? We’ll see on the following pages. 

Thaiphoon Burner has shown the majority of the data, but not all. You can see that the timings are 19-19-19-39 at 1.4 V. The BCPB chips are used here, so the best of B-Die bunch.

The chips are covered with a heatsink to ensure that the memory and PCB maintain a similar temperature, providing the best performance. If you’re not into overclocking and want to simply use the product, you just put the sticks in, enable XMP (which is, in fact, the industry standard, and it’s hard to spot any RAM without this feature nowadays), reboot, and that’s it. Traditionally, we’ll kick off the review with some photo-shooting first and then move on to the practical part (benchmark/games).