At stock speeds the Kingston HyperX beats out the BallistiX by about half a frame per second. By no means huge but performance is performance, especially when taking into account the 266MHz clock speed difference between the two. Regardless of stock speeds the HyperX doesn’t perform as well as the Crucial when both are overclocked.


Again at stock speeds the ultra-low latency of the HyperX wins out. For the overclockers however, the Crucial will show slightly better performance in Counter-Strike: Source.


The HyperX again is faster at stock settings. These are very fast sticks at stock timings and it shows, as the HyperX has won all the tests so far at stock performance. Once again the Crucial beats out everything else when overclocked.


Oblivion's numbers show a similar trend, though the HyperX at lower timings and speeds performs about the same as the BallistiX. Maximum MHz still gives the best performance overall.

The question is: What exactly can we take from these numbers? First off, Kingston has made some incredibly fine-tuned RAM with these HyperX modules at 800MHz. At stock speeds it beats out the fastest RAM kits in house here at FPSLabs, and that is impressive (especially considering the 266MHz speed difference). Another thing to note is that we tested on a Intel platform. If these tests were ran on a AMD machine with the integrated memory controller we would probably have seen an even bigger advantage at stock speeds for the HyperX. It’s also possible that the Kingston could take the overall performance lead even vs. high speeds of the Crucial, as AMD’s integrated memory controller loves low latencies. Our last key point to note is that the HyperX’s latencies seem as fine-tuned as they get. While there is headroom to push speeds by loosening up timings, the opposite isn’t true as there seems to be no headroom to lower the latencies much at all. These sticks really are more in line with the drop-them-in-your-system-and-leave-them style. If you aren’t a big tuner or overclocker these give incredible performance right out of the clamshell.