Intro

In June, HyperX refreshed their Predator DDR4 DRAM lineup to give it a “fierce look” with an aggressive design that offers greater heat dissipation to optimize reliability while the black aluminum heat spreader and black PCB complement the look of the latest PC hardware. HyperX Predator DDR4 DRAM delivers fast frequencies with speeds up to 3333MHz matched with low CL15-CL16 latencies for enthusiasts and for gamers. In fact, in January of 2015, one 4GB module of this same memory was overclocked to 4351MHz, a world record for DDR4 memory at the time.

Last week, HyperX sent us 16GB of PC 26600 as a Predator 2x8GB kit of DDR4 3333MHz for evaluation with our Skylake platform. Up until now, we have been using 2x8GB GSKILL Ripjaws DDR4 3000MHz and we are interested to see if 11% faster RAM will make a noticeable or practical difference in gaming performance using the world’s fastest single-GPU video card, the TITAN X, and also using AMD’s new RX 480 8GB, an upper midrange card.

From our previous testing with Ivy Bridge and Haswell platforms using fast DDR3 versus slower DDR3 only brought limited gains in gaming, and only to a very few games. In this DDR4 evaluation, we shall focus on 2x8GB of Kingston’s fastest HyperX Predator RAM at speeds of 3333MHz while using our Core i7-6700 at 4.4GHz. We want to see if it is worth it for an enthusiast gamer to spend $137.99 at Newegg for 16GB of premium HyperX Predator RAM PC4-26600 (3333MHz) which is $60 more expensive than spending $78 for G.SKILL Ripjaws V Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4 3000 (PC4 24000) as we originally did.

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Our Competing Memory

Here is our testbed of 2 competing 16GB (2x8GB) memory kits.

HyperX PC 26600 DDR4 2x8GB Kit at 3333MHz

G.SKILL Ripjaws V Series 2 PC4 24000 2x8GB DDR4 Kit at 3000MHz

Testing Platform

Our testing platform is Windows 10 Home 64-bit, using an Intel Core i7-6700K at 4.00GHz which turbos to 4.4GHz for all cores as set in the ASRock Z7170 motherboard’s BIOS, and 16GB of G.SKILL DDR4 at 3000MHz or 16GB of HyperX DDR4 at 3333MHz. The settings and hardware are identical except for the two DDR4 kits being tested.

We will compare the performance of 26 modern games at 1920×1080, 2560×1440, and at 3840×2160 resolutions with maximum settings featuring our newest 2016 games including Mirror’s Edge Catalyst and DOOM, and we also include Ashes of the Singularity, Hitman, Rise of the Tomb Raider, and Total War Warhammer, and Deux Ex Mankind Divided using DX12. We have also added Futuremark’s DX12 benchmark, Time Spy.

First, let’s take a closer look at HyperX Predator DDR4 3333MHz kit.