Introduction

Kingston has managed to not only survive in the cut throat world of DRAM production, but to become one of the best memory technologies out there. When we first saw Kingston in our labs those many years ago, back when DDR was king, Kingston memory really didn't impress us. Their yields were low, overclocking was practically non-existent and we had quite a few compatibility issues with some of their modules on a few boards.

Come 2006, HyperX memory really made a name for itself. With DDR2 modules overclocking to the 1200MHz level (or 600MHz clock cycles), this really got out blood pumping. And even today Kingston is used in a few TweakTown test beds; that's just how well they have pulled themselves out of the dirt.

Now we get into some nitty gritty; NVIDIA has been pushing its SLI certified memory back in the DDR2 era for the 680i and AMD 590 chipsets. It also continued into the 680a, though we still haven't seen too many 680a boards around.

Now that NVIDIA has DDR3 chipsets for the Core 2 platform, it's once again pushing its SLI memory. This is a direct competition to the XMP memory standard that Intel already has in place; these two technologies aren't compatible with each other; that is, if you stick an XMP kit into an SLI board, it will work fine, but none of the extra profiles are available, and vice versa. SLI Ready (or EPP as NVIDIA likes to call it) profiles won't work on X38 and X48.

Today we have Kingston's new HyperX PC3-14400 SLI-ready memory; we will be testing it on the Intel X48 platform, as this is the chipset of choice for the Core 2 range, and P45 will be right behind it.