| Corsair Vengeance 1866 MHz DDR3 Memory Kit |
| Reviews - Featured Reviews: Memory | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| Written by Austin Downing | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| Monday, 20 June 2011 | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Corsair Vengeance 1866MHz DDR3 Memory
Manufacturer: Corsair Full Disclosure: The product sample used in this article has been provided by Corsair. Corsair is a well-known name within the memory market and although they have diversified in recent years one of their main focuses is still memory. Their most recent addition to their memory line is the Vengeance which fits in-between their XMS and Dominator lines of RAM. Benchmark Reviews will be looking at the Corsair Vengeance 1866MHz 9-10-9-28 CMZ8GX3M2A1866C9 kit which is perfect for Sandy Bridge systems which require memory speeds to be divisible by 266.66 MHz in order to run at their rated speeds. Since prices have for high performance DDR3 have plummeted in the recent years this kit is priced at only $104.99 compared to the comparable Dominators $169.99 price. Benchmark Reviews will see if corners were cut to reach this price or if Vengeance is the frugal enthusiast best friend. Years ago using the fastest possible memory was the only way to get the full potential out of a processor. This is because in the days before Sandy Bridge getting the highest clock possible was achieved using a combination of changing the clock multiplier, and increasing the FSB or base clock. Because changing these also increased the base speed of the memory using the fastest memory possible was only the only way to push a processor to its upper limits. But things have changed since the Sandy Bridge platform debuted, the only effective way to overclock is to increase the clock multiplier of the K SKU's meaning that memory speed is less important for overclocking and therefore companies are concentrating on dropping prices, and timing to compete with each other. As prices have dropped, users have started demanding more RAM for their systems. With this in mind Corsair has brought out the Vengeance line which has been put within the price range of many enthusiasts. At the same time it provides much of performance that the Dominator line has with its high speed and low latency but at a lower price point than then its older brother has.
Benchmark Reviews wants to be able to provide the most accurate information on the performance of components to its readers and therefore has a very specific way in which tests are run on components. For RAM, each set is run first run through Memtest86+ at its advertised speed to insure that that there are no errors. Once passed a combination of pure benchmark based, and application based tests will be run a total of three times each. Once the results have been acquired the worst score of each test will be thrown out and the final two will be averaged resulting in the final score that will be presented to our readers.
Closer Look: Corsair Vengeance 1866MHzUnlike cases, the aesthetics of RAM will not be something that a user will need to deal with on a daily basis. This means a user can pick the ugliest piece set of ram they can find and as long as it has the same timing, and speed will perform just as well as a tricked out set of RAM. None-the-less enthusiast with Plexiglas windows on their case may want RAM that goes along with the color scheme being used in their system.
Surprisingly, Corsair has forgone using a blister pack and instead has used a cardboard box that contains each stick of memory in its own separate blister pack. On the flipside Corsair has all of the pertinent information users might need including information about this kit, how to contact Corsair, and models numbers for the memory kit.
Like many of their memory lines Corsair's Vengeance is a very stylized kit of memory using aluminum heat spreaders to help dissipate the heat that these high speed IC's create. Realistically DDR3 will never give off enough heat to need these spreaders so their appearance will be a matter of personal preference.
Corsair users a typical glossy black finish on the Vengeance coolers. At the same time Corsair has added a stylized Vengeance logo to the front of each of the memory stick.
Corsair has made easily decipherable part number. The CM stands for Corsair Memory, the following Z is the designation for the Vengeance line, the 8G is because this is a 8 GB kit, X3 designates this as a DDR3 kit, while the M2 defines that this is dual channel, the A1 is a revision number, followed by the speed at 1866MHz and lastly the CAS rating which is 9.
At more than 2" tall in certain areas the Corsair Vengeance could pose a problem for users like me who use large coolers such as the Scythe Mugen 2. I was able to use the Corsair Vengeance only after I mounted the fan on my cooler on the backside. Size is definitely a concern with heat spreaders of this size and therefore I encourage users to check that they will have enough space under their heatsinks before purchasing the Corsair Vengeance kit. Corsair Vengeance Specifications
Supported Motherboards
RAM Testing & ResultsTesting MethodologyWhen testing RAM the preferred method is to remove as many bottlenecks as possible. This ensures that any changes in the benchmarks are dependent on the RAM that is being tested as much as possible. For this reason no games have been included because at the moment games are far more dependent on computers GPU's and CPU's, rather than their memory subsystems. Instead the tests used will be focused on being more memory intensive tasks such as fluid dynamics simulations, compression, and real-time rendering. These benchmarks will be run alongside traditional benchmarking tests that will scale more effectively with speed but will be an unrealistic indication of real world performance. In order to test each RAM kit in the most effective fashion a multistep process was required. First in order to verify the advertised speed each set of RAM they will be initially run the Memtest86+ for one run. Once no errors are found, Windows 7 Professional 64-bit with all of the need tools will be loaded. In order to make sure that fluctuations in other subsystem do not influence the scores, each test will be run a total of three times. At the end of the benchmark the lowest score will be dropped and the final two tests scores will be averaged. The test being used for benchmarking will be as follows.
Test System
Memory Test
Also because each IC produced is slightly different and will have different overclocking characteristics any overclocking results obtained may vary from user's actual experience. In the end this means that spending the time to overclock our system memory will be unbeneficial to our readers and therefore will be omitted from the results except for in special cases, such as when a product is advertised as having a great amount of headroom. We have recently introduced the Euler3D Computational Fluid Dynamics benchmark into our memory test suite and so I would like to give a small explanation as to what is being used. Our newest test simulates the fluid dynamics of a wing and therefore is very memory and CPU intensive. Each test is run and the final result is given in Hertz(Hz). For our purposes the final Hertz score is what will be used for comparing each set of memory to its competitors. It has been found that this benchmark is particularly sensitive to both memory speed and timing and therefore makes a perfect benchmark to add to Benchmark Reviews memory suite. Synthetic BenchmarksBenchmark Reviews users synthetic benchmarks to more effectively show difference between the hardware being tested. These tests are very sensitive to the most minor changes and therefore can highlight the performance difference that exist between different sets of RAM.
AIDA64 provides a memory benchmarking tool that scales well with speed but unfortunately does not respond nearly as well to tightening timings. The increase in performance from the Mushkin Redline Enhanced 1600MHz 7-8-7-24 is around 7.5% for the Read Benchmark increasing from 20264MB/s to 21872.5MB/s. Much like the Sniper, our Vengeance 1866MHz kit provides around a 3% boost in write performance over the low latency 1600MHz 7-8-7-24 Mushkin Redline kit.
One of our newest benchmarking applications MaxxMEM2 provides results that are more responsive to speed changes rather than tightening of timings. The Corsair Vengeance is able scrounge up a 7.5% gain in write performance compared to the 1600MHz 7-8-7-24 kit at 22511.2MB/s compared to 20820MB/s. The write performance is far less interesting with only a ~3% difference between the Vengeance and the Redline Enhanced 1600MHz 7-8-7-24 kit. The last score is an overall memory score in MB/s which has Corsair Vengeance performing roughly 5% better than the Redline Enhanced 1600MHz at 22620MB/s.
Using STREAM SiSoft's Sandra provides a near linear performance increase as the speed of RAM increases. During testing it became apparent that both the G.Skill Sniper and Corsair Vengeance were performing at around 1% each other. Still moving from a 1600MHz kit to a 1866MHz kit such as the Corsair Vengeance provides over a 12% boost in read and write bandwidth moving from compared the 1600MHz 7-8-7-24 moving from 21.275GB/s and 24.2GB/s in integer buffered performance. Application BenchmarkApplication benchmarks are a look at real world performance of the memory being tested. During this review we will be employing a combination of rendering, compression, and simulation to see how timing and speed of memory affects their performance.
Much like games that use DirectX or OpenGL to render their scenes CINIBENCH sees very little in gain by using higher performance RAM. Between the G.Skill RipJaw 1600MHz 9-9-9-24 and the Corsair Vengeance 1866MHz 9-10-9-27 around .5% performance difference well within our 1% margin of error.
Using the benchmarking tool that was built into WinRAR 4.00 we were able to effectively gauge how many kilobytes per second our test bed was able to compress. WinRAR is responsive to speed and timings and as such our Mushkin 1600MHz 7-8-7-24 was able to surpass both of our looser 1866MHz kits. Still compared to the G.Skill RipJaw 1600MHz 9-9-9-24 we were able to gain a respectable 6.4% boost in our compression bandwidth moving from 4019kB/s to 4315kB/s. For those who are frequently compressing large amounts of data this may be worth a 6.4% could add up to a large amount of time over the course of a year.
The speed of Euler 3D simulation is obviously sensitive to both speed and timings. At 1866MHz with 9-10-9-27 timings the Corsair Vengeance provide around 9% more performance than the G.Skill RipJaw 1600MHz 9-9-9-28 at 5.7105Hz compared to 5.1825Hz. Although this may not seem like a useful increase in performance since the calculation being done by this program can be run for days or weeks a 9% increase can be a huge difference in time for long term simulations. Corsair Vengeance 1866MHz Final ThoughtsRAM is a vital component to any computer and the Corsair Vengeance 1866MHz 9-10-9-27 (2 x 4GB) kit provides a great mixture of high speed, moderately tight timings, large size and a lifetime warranty. For programs that are computationally heavy like compression and simulation using faster RAM will make a noticeable difference for large projects involving these kinds of calculations. The problem I have with the Corsair Vengeance is the same I have with many kits of RAM on the market. Companies insist on putting large coolers on their RAM and it limits the choice in CPU heatsinks that can be used within users system. DDR3 does not require these elaborate coolers with its lower voltages which translate to lower temperatures then RAM saw during the DDR, and DDR2 era. Corsair is correcting this with low profile versions of its Vengeance line but ultimately I would like to see the average size of coolers drop instead of having to look for specific low profile versions of a memory line.
Corsair Vengeance 1866MHz ConclusionPerformance is as you would expect providing a 12% bandwidth increase over 1600MHz kits, with relatively tight 9-10-9-27 timings. This translates to a 6-9% increase in real world tasks such as compression and simulation. Gamer should not expect to not see that great of a difference as at most the difference would be a couple of percentage points but usually the gains will be nonexistent. This is a personal preference but I do not like the looks that Corsair has given the Vengeance. Like a large wing on a Honda Civic the heat spreaders don't look cool and serve no real purpose. This is because DDR3 IC's do not give off enough heat to need large heat spreaders to keep them from being damaged. Although light the heat spreader used for the Corsair Vengeance used on the Corsair Vengeance are well made with no flexing in the fins. Performance of RAM is based around being able to function at the manufactures specified speed without errors. In regards to this the Corsair Vengeance performs superbly providing 1866MHz speeds with 9-10-9-27 timings at 1.5v with no errors in Memtest86+. Corsair stands behind their products performance also, providing their users with a limited lifetime warranty in the event that anything does ever go wrong. Priced for $104.99 at Newegg, G.Skill has lined up the Sniper series to fit perfectly in the market. The 1866MHz 9-10-9-28 sector of the market sits completely within +/-$10 of the Corsair Vengeance 1866MHz kit and therefore it ends up being up to the user to pick what design or company they prefer. Overall the Corsair Vengeance 1866MHz 9-10-9-27 (2 x 4GB) memory kit is provides great performance, at a great price. All of this is backed by a lifetime warranty from Corsair make sure that users need not worry about their RAM if it dies three years down the road. Unfortunately Corsair has designed the Vengeance with a heat spreader that may limit its ability to be used with large air coolers. Pros:
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Comments
it seems that synthetic benchmark love the frenguanse.
but normal aplication prefer the timings.
so higher timings means longer time to access memory. higher frequency means better transfer rate. so this 2 work the opposite. you need a lot of transfer rate increase to overcome the loss of the timing. so if applications like winrar that theoretical go faster with a faster transfer rate memory (all needed data loaded to memory compressed and sent to hard drive again, so faster ram better the time) love timings we can imagine what will happen to applications that are not that data dependent. like games that there can not be predicted the data needed to continue. thus loving timing.
You cana lso get CL7 1600 mhz. 8 gig modules. Probably even cheaper than this stuff.
If you do alot at once and are one of those ppl with 3d programs or your always downloading moving multitasking 50 tabs ect and doing allot more there is a difference i can tell u in quantity and stable (yet speedy times) 1866 999 is all around good. Nothing like taking a quick gaming break while keeping everything open and still seeing good frame rates at high settings.
The 1866 sniper BenchmarkReviews just reviewed a week ago is down to 94 USD at newegg 2 X 4 gigs (8 gigs) at 9-10-9 (and will run at 999) just ordered 2
good review
I have honestly never seen a see a usable gain from faster memory in gaming. And in my system the only noticeable difference came when I bought a SSD.
Glad you liked the review though, and glad to see you bought memory based off my previous article. Keep checking here our next 2 memory reviews which will be the 1600Mhz 7-8-7-24 Mushkin Redline Enhanced with the Ridgeback heat spreader and the 2133Mhz 9-10-11-28 Mushkin Redline with the FrostByte heat spreader will be published in the next couple of weeks.
And yeah 9's at anything 18 and above does me right especially when I have so much @ that speed, I can still move fast solidly. I hate purpose built over all around, that way I don't have to close anything or go into a "mode" to game or work or play.
Good review, glad i skipped these.I always thought it was weird Corsair suddenly needed a 3rd brand for value purposes... Something else they had more power over to limit via "ability -to- price" wise. Since they refuse to go HIGHER with dominator simply because they need something to sell later we all know 8,8,8 at 2000 or even 7,10,something has been possible at stock for a long time we just need someone to be bold and watch all the others follow "all a sudden"
The dominators are great also they just released a 2133 at 999 (which may be a revamped version of the last kit just factory timed higher.) that can go down to 2000 at 8's I believe it because my last kit from them could do allot that was not endorsed and confidently. Problem when shopping for them a second time now is price for 4 2X2 gigs... id rather go g.skill at 9 2 x 4 and be limited for that price 99 bux im in.
i.e. Reviews for the G.Skill Sniper 1866Mhz DDR3 F3-14900CL9D and Corsair Vengeance 1866 MHz DDR3 CMZ8GX3M2A1866C9?
You must understand that the memory benchmarks we use measure performance with such minute precision, that the difference could be less than .0001% and it would still stand out in a memory review.
How would two sets of this dual-channel kit work with an i5-4670K on an MSI Z87 MPOWER?