In our midst today a dual channel DDR3 memory kit with low voltage and lots of overclocking headroom. How far will we be able to take this Samsung kit?
Product on Review: Green DDR3 Memory
Manufacturer and Sponsor: Samsung
Street Price: £53.99
Samsung need little introduction, they are a global organisation with roots in almost every avenue you could possibly think of, but when thinking on performance memory or enthusiast memory they are pushed out of the way by other vendors in the market, the product we are looking at today seeks to reach out to the enthusiast and satisfy all of their needs.
Today we will be taking a look at the Samsung Green 30nm DDR3 kit. This memory kit may have been around for quite some time now but it may have slipped the enthusiast’s radar due to availability. Thankfully Overclockers UK have exclusivity on this product and we are grateful for their sample support.
The Samsung Green 30nm kit we will be testing today is a dual channel DDR3 kit with a stock frequency of 1600MHz and CAS timings of 11-11-11-28. There have been many reports of this particular kit being able to reach some intriguing overclocking heights so it will be interesting to see how far we can go with this kit.
Samsung’s take on Green DDR3
Memory’s contribution to system efficiency and power consumption is highly significant. Therefore, the need foroptimizing the use of memory has become extremely important. Samsung 30nm-class, 4Gb DDR3, which delivers bandwidth up to 1.6Gbps, consumes significantly less power than DDR2 and operates with voltage as low as 1.35V. This provides the best performance-to-power efficiency ratio on the market. As highlighted in the charts below, switching to Samsung’s 30nm-class Green DDR3 provides an 86 percent power savings over a 60nm-class-equivalent, 1.8V DDR2 memory chip. Moreover, these improvements translate into a 44 percent power savings at the server level. Higher density servers will achieve even greater power savings. The evolution of green memory continues with a new generation of low-power, highperformance DDR3. Dual-core and multi-core CPUs for multi-tasking activities, 64-bit operating systems and compute-intensive applications such as virtualization, 3D, gaming and photo/video editing are accelerating the need for higherperformance memory with reduced power consumption. From PCs to servers, Samsung’s 30 nanometer (nm)-class Green DDR3 provides designers with the key to creating the most energy efficient, high-performance computing platforms available today. Lowering The Total Cost of IT Ownership Samsung 30nm-class Green DDR3 is designed to put the brakes on energy waste. It provides a server system-level power savings of about 44 percent (from 390 to just 220 watts). The 44 percent savings at the server level equates to significant Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) benefits in the enterprise space. Through the use of Samsung Green DDR3, a data center manager can increase its server resources 86 percent without needing to increase its power budget. As highlighted in the charts below, in a 2K Watt power envelope, Samsung Green DDR3 allows for placing nine servers on a single rack instead of five. The savings become even more significant when operating costs are factored. For example, in a 1000-server farm, only 112 racks would be needed instead of 200, cutting overhead costs proportionately by more than $60K.
Technical Specifications
SPEED RATING: DDR3-1600 (PC3 12800)
RATED TIMINGS: 11-11-11-28
CAPACITY: 8GB (4 GB x2)
TESTED VOLTAGE: 1.35 V
PCB TYPE: 6 Layers
REGISTERED/UNBUFFERED: Unbuffered
ERROR CHECKING: Non-ECC
FORM FACTOR: 240-pin DIMM
WARRANTY: Lifetime
RATED TIMINGS: 11-11-11-28
CAPACITY: 8GB (4 GB x2)
TESTED VOLTAGE: 1.35 V
PCB TYPE: 6 Layers
REGISTERED/UNBUFFERED: Unbuffered
ERROR CHECKING: Non-ECC
FORM FACTOR: 240-pin DIMM
WARRANTY: Lifetime
Closer Look
The Samsung Green DDR3 kit arrives with us in a cardboard blister pack. The front of the packaging leaves you in no doubt about the specifications of this kit, detailing the capacity, speed and that we are dealing with 30nm low voltage modules.
The back of the packaging goes further to tell us the voltage and other specifications to expect. Being a blister pack, to get inside we unfortunately have to destroy the packaging. Personally I’m not a fan of this method of packaging.
The Packaging for Samsung Green DDR3 kit
More details on the reverse
Removing the modules from their packaging an initial observation reveals this kit is significantly shorter than a traditional DDR3 kit – even those without heatsinks.
Printed on one side of each module are the specifications labels, stating the serial number and other details about the kit such as CAS timings which are 11-11-11-28. This kit is low voltage at just 1.35v and doesn’t have to acquire components from other vendors since Samsung are a supplier. Throughout Samsung have used 30nm HYK0 components and of course a much shorter PCB.
The modules – short, without heatsinks and low voltage
For size comparison the Green DD3 kit has been placed along-side a popular low-profile DDR3 kit – Kingston Genesis HyperX. Whilst the Samsung kit still fits inside the DDR3 specifications (240pin) the Samsung kit is clearly of different stature.
Overall height of the Kingston DDR3 module is 2.8cm – the heatspreader increases the height by a mere 1mm meaning the kit provides excellent clearance for those with big CPU coolers. The Samsung kit goes further than this to deliver even more clearance, side by side the Samsung module is almost half the size of the Kingston at just under 2cm in total height. This is fantastic news for those wanting minimal obstruction.
Samsung compared to Kingston
Samsung Green kit offers even more clearance compared to a low-profile kit
On the next page we will be putting this kit through its paces to determine what we can expect in terms of performance.
Test System & Overclocking
Test system
CPU Intel Core i5 3570K (Ivy Bridge)
Motherboard MSI Z77A-GD65
Graphics MSI R7970 Black Edition
Memory 8GB Corsair Vengeance 2133MHz
HDD Kingston HyperX 240GB (SATA 3)
PSU OCZ 750W Fatal1ty
CPU Cooler Alpenfohn K2
OS Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 64-Bit
CPU Intel Core i5 3570K (Ivy Bridge)
Motherboard MSI Z77A-GD65
Graphics MSI R7970 Black Edition
Memory 8GB Corsair Vengeance 2133MHz
HDD Kingston HyperX 240GB (SATA 3)
PSU OCZ 750W Fatal1ty
CPU Cooler Alpenfohn K2
OS Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 64-Bit
Overclocking
Whilst we will be showing stock performance for the Samsung Green DDR3 kit, we also want to know how far we can push this kit in terms of overclocking. Rather than working our way up from 1600MHz (which is the stock frequency) I decided to do the opposite and jump straight to 2400MHz, slacken the CAS timings off and bump DRAM voltage up to 1.7v. Straight away I hit a brick wall. No matter what settings I used at 2400MHz I simply could not even get a solid boot so I moved down to 2200MHz. With this frequency the system was extremely unstable and struggled to get past POST (even with a significant boost in voltage) so I eventually came to 2133MHz and here I found stability. So with a boot into windows and stability test complete I began improving the settings at 2133MHz, lowering the voltage and tweaking the CAS timings until I eventually came to 1T-10-10-10-28 2133MHz @ 1.4v – which is quite an achievement for a 1600MHz kit.
So with the best overclock, modification now found – we will benchmark this kit with both stock and overclocked settings to demonstrate the performance results
Benchmarks: AIDA64
AIDA64 is an industry leading system diagnostics and benchmarking solution for enthusiasts PC users, based on the award-winning AIDA64 Technology. During system optimizations and tweaking it provides essential system and overclock information, advanced hardware monitoring and diagnostics capabilities to check the effects of the applied settings. CPU, FPU and memory benchmarks are available to measure the actual system performance and compare it to previous states or other systems.
STOCK 1600MHz
OVERCLOCK 2133MHz
Benchmarks: SiSoftware SANDRA 2012
SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software. Sandra is a (girl) name of Greek origin that means “defender”, “helper of mankind”. We think that’s quite fitting.
Benchmarks: HyperPI 0.99b
The HiperPI front-end is basically a program which allows selecting multiple threads of SuperPi to be run at the same time so you can test the stability and performance on multi-core machines.
Benchmarks: SuperPI 1.5
In August 1995, the calculation of pi up to 4,294,960,000 decimal digits was succeeded by using a supercomputer at the University of Tokyo. The program was written by D.Takahashi and he collaborated with Dr. Y.Kanada at the computer center, the University of Tokyo. This record should be the current world record. (Details is shown in the windows help. ) This record-breaking program was ported to personal computer environment such as Windows NT and Windows 95 and called Super PI. In order to calculate 33.55 million digits, it takes within 3 days with Pentium 90MHz, 40MB main memory and 340MB available storage.
Benchmarks: 3DMark 11 & DIRT 3
Designed to measure your PC’s gaming performance 3DMark 11 makes extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to consistently and reliably test DirectX 11 under game-like loads.
Conclusion
Before receiving the Samsung Green 30nm DDR3 kit I was slightly dubious as to their performance after taking a quick look at the kit online – how short-sighted I was…
This kit exceeds expectations. It’s fair to assume from their modest visual appearance that they aren’t the most aggressive looking memory kit you will come across but looks can be deceiving. Stock performance equaled and even bested the notorious Kingston Genesis HyperX we put against the Samsung kit but overclocking is where this product really excels. There have been reports of the Samsung Green 30nm kit reaching and exceeding 2400MHz – whilst we couldn’t attain such heights we did reach an assertive 2133MHz at CL10, which we should not snub our noses at. With this overclock achieved we were able to reap even better performance results in a range of benchmarks.
The real highlight with the Samsung Green 30nm kit is the fact they use a smaller PCB, are low profile, low voltage and low priced. Prices have fluctuated over the last week but the this kit under review today can be found for around £50 inc. VAT at Overclockers UK.
So all in all, the Samsung Green 30nm kit provides the best clearance compatibility, very good performance at stock and offer lots of headroom for overclocking. Those with an interest in all these areas should look no further.
Pros
+ Great value for money
+ Top performance
+ Overclock very well
+ Only 2cm tall
+ Low voltage
Cons
– Lack aesthetics
+ Great value for money
+ Top performance
+ Overclock very well
+ Only 2cm tall
+ Low voltage
Cons
– Lack aesthetics
Click here for an explanation of our awards at Vortez.net. Thanks to Overclockers UK for providing today’s review sample.
