Galax HOF OC Lab Water Cooling 4400 MHz CL19 review

Memory (DDR4/DDR5) and Storage (SSD/NVMe) 367 Page 22 of 22 Published by

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Final Words & Conclusion

Final Words & conclusion

The Galax HOF OC Lab Water Cooling series is overall an excellent offer for the extreme overclockers. It’s not an offer for some “average Joe.” This RAM was limited to only 50 units as the Samsung B-Die chips were hand-picked. Well, these 4400 MHz are achieved with the timings of 19-19-19-39 and only (for this frequency, it’s only) 1.4 V applied. The kit is top-of-the-top as there’s a ten-layer PCB used, and it’s A2 revision (so the best possible). There’s no choice of the frequencies available, as 4400 MHz used here was limited, and there’s a 4000 MHz, but it has worse timings (19-25-25-45), and the A1 PCB used (not as good, but still a great one). Only the 2 x 8 GB kits are listed, but you should have expected that the 16 GB modules are not so highly overclockable as the 8 GB piece. There’s no choice of colours, but that’s not a drawback. We got the two 8 GB modules, with a default frequency of 4400 MHz and timings of 19-19-19-39, so with XMP enabled, this kit is targeted at customers interested in an outstanding out-of-the-box performance. But what happens if you tweak it? That’s not a fascinating story. We see the Samsung B-Dies - we achieved 3600 CL14 on the AMD system. Why’s that? We’d recommend sticking to 3600-3733 MHz on AMD systems to keep the Infinity Fabric divider at 1:1 (this way, you avoid any score decrease at 2:1). Additionally – the Ryzen 5000 series should also make the overclock/tuning of the RAM better (and I should finally move to it from 3700X). The Intel was 4600 CL19, but it’s not a surprise that the gain is not too significant, as already the XMP setting is excellent. The Z590 board is already used here, so no real improvements are expected than the previous reviews, where the combo of Z390 and i9 9900K has been placed in the system platform.
 

Aesthetics

Galax made the HOF OC Lab Water Cooling look fantastic. The heat spreader is in silver aluminum, so it’ll look lovely in any system, and the aRGB LEDs that are used on the water block – can be synchronized with other components as they should have.



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Tweaking

The memory chips used here come from Samsung, and they’re the famous B-dies. We achieved a nice CL14 at 3600 Mhz and 1.45 V (1.4 V is the baseline value) on AMD, and CL19 at 4600 Mhz and 1.45 V (1.4 V default) on Intel. There’s almost no possible improvement to be expected, as the out-of-the-box setting is already significantly trimmed.

Gaming performance

That's a 1920x1080 (Full HD) gaming chart based on the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. You can see the differences between the 8 core CPUs from AMD and 10-core Intel processors and what improvement you can achieve after overclocking each system's memory. Is it worth it? It's your call (but you need to remember the OC is free and only needs some time to set/test the stability). For Ryzen - the improvement vs generic 3200 MHz RAM is significant. For the Intel - XMP vs OC is usually a 1 fps improvement (so not really worth it).



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Conclusion

The reviewed Galax HOF OC Lab Water Cooling comes with a very high default frequency (4400 MHz) that should be more than enough for the vast majority of users. The saved XMP 2.0 profile is supposed to make your life easier and make the best compatibility available. The stock performance is in a range of what was expected (thus – high-end). There’s some headroom still available. You can try to overclock this memory a bit. With the reviewed kit, on our X470 and Z590 platforms, it was possible to achieve 4400 MHz with CL19 on the Intel system, whereas on the AMD one, we stayed at 3600 Mhz to keep the Infinity Fabric divider at 1:1, but with optimized timings and CL14. It’s an excellent result, and we didn’t even expect more from the Samsung B-Dies. Either way, you need to remember that reproducibility is never guaranteed, and your results may vary. Moving on to the compatibility, the heat spreader is a low-profile one (39 mm), so you shouldn’t encounter any clearance problems with the vast majority of CPU coolers. The 16 GB capacity looks pretty standard to most users nowadays. The 2 x 8 GB kit (4400 CL19) was priced at 344 EUR, which was relatively reasonable for the things you get here. In the end, we decided to give Galax a “Guru3D Top Pick” award for this great-looking and performing kit. There’s still some OC headroom, although the XMP setting was already very tight. You also get the water block from Bitspower, and it’s with an aRGB lighting on top of it. We need to underline that it’s mainly aimed at the overclockers or the modders. Still - it’s a pity that it was so limited. Galax – maybe some “resurrection” can happen in this case? (although the Samsung B-Die's were supposed to be out of stock, not produced anymore)

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