Patriot Viper Steel RGB 3600 MHz (2x 16GB) review - Final Words & Conclusion

Final Words & conclusion

The Patriot Viper Steel RGB series brings a mixed bag of emotions. On the one hand, you get a nice-looking kit with great RGB lighting (the synchronization works fantastically), on the other hand – not even average latencies for the frequency given (CL20 for 3600 MHz and CL18 for 3200 MHz). The choice of frequencies that this product range offers is very limited. The slowest module in this series operates at 3200 MHz, and the fastest one reaches 3600 MHz, which is pretty average for today’s standards. The two 16 GB modules that we got, with a default frequency of 3600 MHz and very “curious” timings of 20-26-26-46, leave a lot to be desired. The default performance is below the average. With XMP enabled, this kit is clearly targeted at customers interested mostly in the visual aspect. But what happens if you tweak it? That’s a quite different story. We achieved 3600 CL16 on the AMD system, and 4000 CL19 on the Intel, which is actually quite nice. "Not great, not terrible" (3.6 Roentgen). While we’re at it, we’d definitely 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). For Intel systems, the 4000 MHz looks really good. I’d say that +400 MHz and -1 CL is not too shabby. It’s also not unreasonable to assume that you could go even higher with a Z490 board, as these things typically bring better-overclocking capabilities. 

Aesthetics

Patriot made the Viper Steel RGB look astonishing. The heat spreader is black, so it’ll look great in any system, and the 5-zone RGB LED lighting synchronizes with other components really well. It’s one of the best sync executions we’ve seen so far.    

Tweaking

The memory chips used here come from Hynix, and they’re most probably CJRs. We achieved a nice CL16 at 3600 Mhz and 1.45 V (1.35 V is the baseline value) on AMD, and CL19 at 4000 Mhz and 1.45 V (1.35 V default) on Intel. You can always try to lower the latencies and go even higher with the frequency (especially if you have a Z490, rather than a Z390 one)         

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 Intel 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).

Conclusion

The reviewed Patriot Viper Steel RGB comes with a default frequency (3600 MHz) that in theory should be enough for the majority of users, but the XMP 2.0 profile that’s supposed to make your life easier also forces very poor latencies. If you’re not just in it for the looks, you can try (or should I say need) to overclock this memory a bit. With the reviewed kit, on our X470 and Z390 platforms, it was possible to achieve 4000 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 CL16. It’s a very nice result. We didn’t expect that, especially looking at the default CL20 timings. You could achieve even more with a Z490 system, though, but we don’t have that on our test bench (yet). Either way, you need to remember that reproducibility is never guaranteed, and your results may vary.

Moving on to compatibility, the heat spreader is a relatively low-profile one (44 mm), so you shouldn’t encounter any clearance problems with most CPU coolers. The 32 GB capacity may seem a lot to most users nowadays, but it’s becoming more common due to dropping RAM prices (that might actually change soon). The 2 x 16 GB kit is priced at ~145 USD, which is rather reasonable, but you need to remember that in the default state the performance will be rather disappointing due to the timings saved in the XMP. It’s a product that gave us a mixed bag of emotions, but in the end, we decided to give Patriot a “Guru3D approved” award for this great-looking kit. The deciding factor here wasn’t the poor default timings, of course, but the performance after a bit of tweaking. Users who like to dabble in the fine art of ram overclocking will have no problem unlocking this product’s full potential. And if you’re not interested in performance but just love the looks, you don’t really care about that anyway. Bottom line: it’s a good kit with one major flaw (timings) that can be fixed easily, and frankly, we wonder why Patriot didn’t do that themselves.

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