Kingston HyperX PnP series

Eight seems to be the magic number when it comes to RAM these days, and even notebook users can easily achieve this with the likes of Kingston’s 8GB DDR3-1866 SO-DIMM memory kit from their HyperX Plug and Play (PnP) series.

Unless specified otherwise, the RAM in your notebook is likely to be DDR3-1333, and if you have either 2GB or 4GB preinstalled, it’s also likely to be a single memory stick running in a single data channel. Hence, the benefits of a kit like the HyperX are multiple – you get more memory which runs faster and has twice the bandwidth for transferring data to and from the rest of your system.

Personally I’m a bit of a sceptic when it comes to RAM – I think adding large amounts of memory into a system is more of a marketing ploy by vendors than a genuine attempt at improving performance – so I put this RAM to the test to see what difference it could make, if any, over a standard 4GB single-channel DDR-1333 stick.

The test notebook packed an Intel Core i7-2617M processor and a Nvidia GT 540M graphics chipset. Our standard test suite of Cinebench R11, 7-Zip and 3DMark11 were used as well as the Adobe Photoshop CS5 Retouch Artists speed test.

The 8GB of HyperX PnP averaged less than 5% better performance in our tests than the slower memory with half the capacity and half the bandwidth. Perhaps our tests just aren’t RAM-dependant enough, but it certainly shows that adding more and faster RAM does not instantly mean better performance all-round.

At around twice the price of generic 8GB DDR3-1333 kits, and quadruple the price of single 4GB DDR3-1333 sticks, the 8GB HyperX PnP kit is a hard sell, unless you’re using a very specific application which demands fast RAM, and lots of it.