The vigorous look of the Dark DDR4’s armor-style spreader transforms the memory device into a valiant dark knight riding a dark horse. The Team Group Dark DDR4 offers performance with improved cooling.
Product on Review: TDRED416G3000HC16CDC01Manufacturer and Sponsor: Team Group
Street Price: UK: £109.99, US: $109.99
Team Group is a world renowned memory maker since the DDR1 era. With today’s many offerings when it comes to memory modules, Team Group has also moved forward into the ‘gaming’ brand of hardware with the introduction of the T-FORCE gaming products. One of Team Group’s T-FORCE gaming memory line is the Dark DDR4 which we will be taking a look at today.While many brands are jumping into the RGB lighting trend of virtually all PC hardware you can think of today, some would still prefer less or no lighting at all in their gaming PC. The Team Group Dark DDR4 memory features a beefy four-piece heat spreader and low working voltage of around 1.2V to 1.4V. The kit we will be testing is a 16GB (2x8GB) kit at 3000Mhz.
How well with the Team Group Dark DDR4 perform against some of the popular offerings available today? Let’s find out.
Team Group’s Take on the Dark DDR4
The Team Group design team had built a heat spreader with an all new exterior design concept. The vigorous look of top notch armor style spreader transforms the memory device of the computer hardware into a valiant dark knight riding a dark horse. The new DDR4 Dark 4-piece heat spreader design improves heat dissipation performance by 8% compared to the DDR3 version. The double-layer heat spreader offers better memory protection overall. The Team Group Dark DDR4 also features ultra low working voltage of 1.2V to 1.4V giving you up to 40% energy saving. It also support XMP 2.0 with 1-step overclocking.
Technical Specifications
Below are the technical specifications of the particular memory kit Team Group gave us to review:
Warranty: Lifetime
Memory Type: DDR4
Package Memory Format: DIMM
Package Memory Pin: 288
Performance Profile: XMP 2.0
Memory Size: 16GB Kit (2 x 8GB)
SPD Latency: CL15-15-15-35 / CL16-18-18-38
SPD Speed: 3000MHz
SPD Voltage: 1.35V
Heat Sink: 4-piece Aluminum heat-sink
Memory Type: DDR4
Package Memory Format: DIMM
Package Memory Pin: 288
Performance Profile: XMP 2.0
Memory Size: 16GB Kit (2 x 8GB)
SPD Latency: CL15-15-15-35 / CL16-18-18-38
SPD Speed: 3000MHz
SPD Voltage: 1.35V
Heat Sink: 4-piece Aluminum heat-sink
Closer Look
The Team Group Dark DDR4 memory kit does have an aggressive look on its heat sink given that it is a 4-piece design that expands sideward not just for aesthetics but also to have a larger area for passive air to cool it down. The design is said to dissipate heat 8% better compared to the Dark DDR3 memory modules.
The memory doesn’t have LED lighting which is great if you don’t like lighting on your build. Hence, it sports a red-black theme that will fit most of the ‘gaming’ themed hardware available today.
On top of the heat sink is a Team Group branding on both sides so it would look uniform even if you got alternative DIMM slots from the likes of LGA 2011-3 socket motherboards.
Test Setup
CPU: Intel Core i7-6700K
Cooling: Custom Liquid Cooling
Motherboard: GIGABYTE Z170X Gaming 6
Graphics: GIGABYTE GTX 970 Xtreme Gaming
Storage: Transcend SSD370S
PSU: EVGA SuperNOVA P2 1200 80 Plus Platinum Certified PSU
Cooling: Custom Liquid Cooling
Motherboard: GIGABYTE Z170X Gaming 6
Graphics: GIGABYTE GTX 970 Xtreme Gaming
Storage: Transcend SSD370S
PSU: EVGA SuperNOVA P2 1200 80 Plus Platinum Certified PSU
Other DDR4 memory kits we tested to be included for comparison in our review today are the following below:
– Team Group Dark DDR4 16GB 3000Mhz
– Team Group Delta DDR4 16GB 3000Mhz
– G.Skill Trident Z DDR4 3466 MHz 8GB 3466Mhz
– Corsair Vengeance LED DDR4 16GB 3200MHz
The above offers a mixture of smaller capacity with higher/lower frequency and large capacity with high frequency. This should present us with a good demonstration as to how capacity and frequency affects performance.
To benchmark these DDR4 kits we’ll be using the following benchmarking applications:
AIDA64 Engineer Edition
Passmark Memory
SiSoft Sandra
7-Zip
Super PI Modded 1.5
Passmark Memory
SiSoft Sandra
7-Zip
Super PI Modded 1.5
Benchmarks: AIDA64 Engineer Edition
AIDA64 Product PageThis simple integer benchmark focuses on the branch prediction capabilities and the misprediction penalties of the CPU. It finds the solutions for the classic “Queens problem” on a 10 by 10 sized chessboard. At the same clock speed theoretically the processor with the shorter pipeline and smaller misprediction penalties will attain higher benchmark scores. For example — with HyperThreading disabled — the Intel Northwood core processors get higher scores than the Intel Prescott core based ones due to the 20-step vs 31-step long pipeline. CPU Queen Test uses integer MMX, SSE2 and SSSE3 optimizations.
Benchmarks: PassMark Memory
PassMark Software Product PageThe Advanced Memory Test is part of the PerformanceTest application, and it is designed to test several factors which affect the speed of which data is accessed in PC memory.
You can think of computer memory as a long continuous strip. The strip is composed of millions (sometimes billions) of slots. Each slot has a unique identifying value called its address. On 32 bit Windows platforms the size of each slot is 32 bits or 4 bytes ( 1 byte = 8 bits ). Windows moves data onto and off of this strip as required. For instance, running an executable file from a disk causes Windows to copy the file from the disk to memory and then run the executable from there.
You can think of computer memory as a long continuous strip. The strip is composed of millions (sometimes billions) of slots. Each slot has a unique identifying value called its address. On 32 bit Windows platforms the size of each slot is 32 bits or 4 bytes ( 1 byte = 8 bits ). Windows moves data onto and off of this strip as required. For instance, running an executable file from a disk causes Windows to copy the file from the disk to memory and then run the executable from there.
Benchmarks: SiSoftware SANDRA
SANDRA isn’t always a benchmark that is included in hardware reviews but I believe it shouldn’t be ignored. SANDRA provides a vigorous package that tests your system in a rather large array of benchmarks. There are many aspects of benchmark that can be executed. We will be considering – CPU and memory tests.
Benchmarks: Super PI Mod 1.5
Super PI is a single threaded benchmark ideal for testing pure, single threaded x86 floating point performance and while most of the computing market has shifted towards multithreaded applications and more modern instruction sets, Super PI still remains quite indicative of CPU capability in specific applications such as computer gaming.
Benchmarks: 7-Zip
This form allows you to measure the performance of your computer.The benchmark shows a rating in MIPS (million instructions per second). The rating value is calculated from the measured speed, and it is normalized with results of Intel Core 2 CPU with multi-threading option switched off. So if you have modern CPU from Intel or AMD, rating values in single-thread mode must be close to real CPU frequency. There are two tests, compression with LZMA method and decompression with LZMA method. Once the total passes reaches 100, the score is taken.
Conclusion
Team Group has been around for quite sometime and it is great to see the brand stepping up and venturing into ‘gaming’ themed hardware with the introduction of their T-FORCE line. The T-FORCE Dark DDR4 in particular features a unique eye-catching 4-piece heat spreader design likened to a ‘dark knight’ which doesn’t only add to the aesthetics but also improves cooling of the heat spreader.The Dark DDR4 kit is offered in black/red and black/grey which should fit most of the gaming themed hardware offered today. However, given that there are kits offered with RGB lighting customization today, we could say the color options of the Dark DDR4 is rather limited compared to other offerings.
With the kit optimized for Z170 use, stability of the kit was excellent. With 16-18-18-36 timings and a low operating voltage of 1.25V, the kit has excellent gaming performance through hours of Overwatch with browsers and other applications running in the background even though it may be outperformed by other offerings in our tests. You can find the Dark DDR4 black/red and black/grey 16GB (2x8GB) 3000Mhz kit in the UK for £109.99, US for $109.99 at the time of this writing which is one the cheaper side of DDR4 kits. Its great value and stability makes it worthy to be considered on your next gaming PC.
If you are looking for a great gaming themed DDR4 kit without the fancy and bright LED lighting, the Team Group T-FORCE Dark DDR4 with its beefy dark knight armor heat sink might meet your expectations.
Pros
+ Stylish and aggressive design
+ Stable performance
Cons
– Height and width could be an issue with small form factor builds and some coolers
– Wouldn’t fit other gaming color themes other than black/red or black/grey theme.
+ Stylish and aggressive design
+ Stable performance
Cons
– Height and width could be an issue with small form factor builds and some coolers
– Wouldn’t fit other gaming color themes other than black/red or black/grey theme.
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