HyperX Savage 8GB DDR3 RAM Review : The Red Baron

Most of us know that Kingston is a trusted manufacturer of memory products like flash drives and RAMs. What some of us might not know is that they have a Red Bull anointed offspring called HyperX as well. HyperX makes high performance products that are more or less oriented for gamers and one such product, the Savage 8GB DDR3 Ram recently made its home in our workstations and boy did it roar!

Savage is the midrange line of RAMs from HyperX. This range goes from 4GB up to 32GB and can have a CAS latency ranging from CL9 to CL11. It is also offered with speeds of 1600, 1866, 2133 and 2400MHz. Aimed for overclocking purposes these RAMs come with 2 XMP profiles so you can turn the savagery up by a few notches. These RAMs also undergo rigorous testing and come with lifetime warranty just in case you need it. We got a single 8GB stick clocked at 2133MHz with a CL11 latency. This RAM use 1.65V which is slightly more than what we expected but it is still not a big deal but at the base 1600Mhz it runs at 1.5V

The first and foremost striking feature of the Savage is its bright red looks. The red aluminium heatsink compliments the all black PCB underneath it and the asymmetrical heat spreaders up-top really put the inverted commas in Savage! While Savage comes dressed only in the dazzling metallic red attire it's younger sibling does come in four different colours.  The RAM is pretty small in its dimensions yet very heavy and feels like it indeed has been made with very high quality material. The small height (33.3mm) also means that it will easily fit in the most congested of cases without a problem or without disturbing any other components. In fact I was a little surprised when I actually held the RAM in my hand for the first time. This 240 pin RAM is also compatible with almost all the boards in the market.

So once we fit the RAM in our system and booted it normally and found the RAM running at the 1600MHz rate. From then on we went on with our usual work which involves opening  multiple heavy software at the same time. We were able to edit videos in Premiere Pro while occasionally switching to Photoshop for cropping and resizing some images while also listening to music. Then we decided to test the XMP profiles that come with the RAM. So we dove right into the BIOS menu and just navigated to the memory tab where we were given the choice to go from Auto to one of the two XMP profiles. This really makes things a lot better and safer for some who do not know the nitty-gritty of the volatile nature of overclocking and yet want some more form their RAM.

The box of the HyperX Savage itself has the words 'ACCELERATE GAMING!' which implies the product's intentions. Thus I called a few colleagues of mine who were bored out of doing their everyday desk job for a little gaming session. Our test rig had an Intel Core i5 6500 processor and an Asus Nvidia GTX 960 Strix graphics card. The resulting setup gave us an average of 53-57 fps at high settings in all the latest generation titles such as Assassin's Creed Syndicate, GTA V and The Witcher 3. The results dropped slightly in Arkham Knight but that however can be contributed to the bad port that it got for PC. Taking some of the latest games like these to Ultra can bring the fps down to about 45fps.

However it is known that RAMs have little to no effect on the gaming performance as most of the work is done by the processor and the GPU. But if you (for some funny reason) can afford the Savage 8GB RAM but do not own a graphics card then the work done by the VRAM of a GPU falls on the CPU and the RAM. The amount of memory on the CPU is not much thus a lot has to be done by the RAM. Thus we took the Savage and slotted it in a less privileged system with an Intel Core i5 2300, 4GB Adata RAM clocked at 1333MHz and no GPU. The test results here did yield some more frames in the titles. Of course we had to drop down to medium or low settings but there was a noticeable increase of about 6-8 fps. As a final test we put the RAM in another system with the same specs as the one before but here the motherboard supported a max of 1333MHz. Due to the speed limitation here, the HyperX Savage performed just like any other RAM would.

The 8GB single stick HyperX Savage RAM can be bought through online portals for approximately Rs 6,000. While it may not be the perfect RAM in terms of latency and voltage consumption, it does manage to rise above the rest in terms of real world performance. The build and looks send a strong message about the company's commitment of providing well made and gorgeous looking products to consumers.