Memory

Patriot Viper 3 Black Mamba Edition 8GB 2133MHz DDR3 Review

vortez
July 26, 2012 9 Min Read
3 0

The new Viper 3 Series is in our midst. Dubbed Black Mamba Edition we’re hoping for a deadly blow.




Product on Review: Viper 3 Series
Manufacturer and Sponsor: Patriot
Street Price: £47.99 / $55 (At time of review)

Patriot Memory are a well-established brand. Being founded in 1985 they have already developed an extensive product range spanning memory, SSDs, flash media and NAS devices. We’ve reviewed many of Patriot Memory’s products here at Vortez and they have proven to be reputable. Ticking the boxes for performance, quality and pricing. Today Patriot Memory launch a new product and we are on hand to deliver our verdict.

The Viper Series has been synonymous with style and speed and today we see the Series enter its 3rd Generation; Viper 3. Viper 3 uses a custom designed head-spreader and has been tailored for dual and quad channel ready motherboards in a variety of capacities – 8GB, 16GB and 32GB and with frequencies from 1600MHz up to 2133MHz.

Today we will be taking a look at an 8GB (2x4GB) 2133MHz dual channel DDR3 kit designed for use with Intel’s 6 and 7 Series. Can this Black Mamba edition blow everything out of the water? Let’s find out.



Patriot Memory on Viper 3 Series
Patriot Memory’s Viper 3 Series are designed with true performance in mind. Tested and compatible with Intel’s® and AMD’s DDR3 compatible processors and chipsets, The Viper 3 series provides the best performance and stability for the most demanding computer environments.

The Viper 3 series utilizes a custom designed high performance heat shield for superior heat dissipation to ensure rock solid performance even when using the most taxing applications. Built from the highest quality Build of Materials, Patriot Memory’s Viper 3 Series are hand tested and validated for system compatibility.

Technical Specifications


Series
Viper 3
Edition
Black Mamba
Capacity
8GB (2 x 4GB) kit
DIMM Type
240-Pin NON-ECC UDIMM
Voltage
1.5V
Tested Frequency
PC3-17000 (2133MHz)
Tested Timings
11-11-11-27
Base Frequency
PC3-12800 (1600MHz)
Base Timings
9-9-9-24
Tested Platforms
Intel® 6 & 7 Series
Feature Overclock
XMP 1.3

Packaging & Closer Look


The Viper 3 kit is presented in a cardboard packet – the packaging lists the type, capacity and speed of the memory and even has a window to lure consumers in and get a first glimpse of this DDR3 kit. There is nothing on the back aside from a very short description of the product and a serial number.

The modules are encased within a blister pack that simply unclips – you do not need to use a knife and destroy the packaging in order to get at the product itself. It’s good to see that Patriot have used such a method.


The packaging for Viper 3


There are no bundled items with this kit so we will go straight into examining the modules themselves. First things first; this kit is simply one of the best looking DDR3 products we have seen, cosmetically the black PCB and corresponding black heat-spreaders are an enthusiast eye candy. Being “Black Mamba” edition this particular kit has been tailored in such a fashion, there are other colours available but I can see why this option would be the most popular. Combine them with a respective Z77 motherboard such as GIGABYTE Z77X-UD5H or ASRock Z77 Extreme4 and you have one stealthy looking setup indeed.


Sleek, stylish and quite aggressive



Dubbed ‘Black Mamba’ you can clearly see why


Although Viper 3 can be deemed low-profile, the aluminium heat-spreaders still extend above the modules themselves. This extension is a mere 1.3cm and shouldn’t present any clearance issues for big CPU coolers. It certainly didn’t present any problems with the Alpenfohn K2 used in the testing procedure later in this review.


Aluminium heat-spreaders are 1.3cm taller than the modules


Flipping one of the sticks over, Patriot have given the Viper 3 a specifications label detailing the speed, CAS latency, voltage and capacity of this kit – 2133MHz 11-11-11-27 @ 1.5v. The product number identifier is also found on this label; should you need it for technical support.


Label details the Viper 3 specifications

Test System & Overclocking


Test system
CPU Intel Core i5 3570K (Ivy Bridge)
Motherboard MSI Z77A-GD65
Graphics MSI R7970 Black Edition
Memory Patriot Viper 3 ‘Black Mamba’ 8GB 2133MHz (11-11-11-27 – 1.5v)
HDD Kingston HyperX 240GB (SATA 3)
PSU OCZ 750W Fatal1ty
CPU Cooler Alpenfohn K2
OS Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 64-Bit





Overclocking

As you can well imagine – there isn’t a great deal of headroom with a DDR3 kit that has a frequency of 2133MHz at 11-11-11-27 but try we must. Pushing this kit proved very hard indeed but this is to be expected, bearing in mind the calibre and specifications. Trying to nudge the frequency up to 2400MHz at stock was nigh on impossible, as indeed was 2400MHz with looser timings – 11-12-11-30 @ 1.65v. We did get a boot beyond POST and managed to see the Windows 7 logo but this was as far as was possible.

Establishing that a frequency overclock was not on the cards I decided to lower the latencies at stock (2133MHz) to ascertain if this can be improved upon at all. 9-10-9-30 did boot into Windows but was found to be unstable so I decided to try 10-11-10-30 which just like the previous settings; did boot, but this time was stable. I’m sure with some advanced tweaking and different configurations better results may well be possible.

As a result, we shall be testing this kit with just the stock settings configured 2133MHz – 11-11-11-27 at 1.5v.

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.



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.

It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc.





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


The market is littered with 1600MHz DDR3 kits for Z68/Z77 and thanks to significant price-drops this has made way for faster kits being even more affordable. Enthusiasts using Sandy Bridge/Ivy Bridge are fortunate enough to only have dual channel kits to invest in, which are much cheaper than triple/quad channel but also have such options as 2133MHz within grasp.

The new Viper 3 series we have been taking a look at today is a work of art to behold. Aesthetically, Patriot have hit the nail on the head. Dubbed ‘Black Mamba’ this kit just as its venomous moniker suggests; looks deadly and as performance has shown, is fast. Although performance in some areas demonstrated nominal difference between rivals the Viper 3 kit displayed solid performance and did not shy away.



Priced at approximately £47.99 / $55 the Viper 3 8GB 2133MHz kit is reasonably priced. It’s obviously more than most 1600MHz kits but then can such a product exceed 2000MHz? If bandwidth and better overall performance is the order of the day then opting for a faster kit is certainly a sensible move.

Those who are wanting to overclock further should look at a different kit within the series as this 2133MHz kit with CL11 prevents such modifications. This particular kit would be most useful to those who aren’t interested in tweaking memory and want the best performance out of the box.

Patriot’s Viper 3 Series is sure to be the talk of the town. Visually this new DDR3 kit is enthusiast eye candy and the other boxes are ticked too. Performance is solid and pricing is fair. Those looking for plenty of memory bandwidth and who are building a stealthy, aggressive rig would do well to consider this product. Viper 3 Series comes highly recommended by Vortez and attains the prestigious Gold award.

Pros
+ Beautiful aesthetics
+ Plenty of bandwidth out of the box
+ Solid performance
+ Lifetime warranty

Cons
– Overclocking ruled out



Click here for an explanation of our awards at Vortez.net.

Tags:

Patriot

Share Article

vortez