When DDR3 technology started entering the market, Kingston released a module from its HyperX series, called the DDR3-1375 CL7 (CAS Latency) alongside two more memory sticks. The new DDR3 broke the 1,066MHz mark and reached a clockspeed of 1,333MHz. However, Kingston has tweaked the clockspeed to reach 1,375MHz, hence the name.

The memory kit consists of a pair of 1GB memory modules, with latency timings of 7-7-7-20. Now some of the DDR3-1333 RAM out there has the same latency. What puts Kingston’s new DDR3 RAM above them is not only its clockspeed, but its voltage requirement of 1.7V compared to 1.8V that other RAM need. With an MSI X38 Diamond motherboard, we ran some benchmarks on Kingston’s memory card. Do note that the memory bus speed supported was only 1,066MHz. PCMark awarded it with a score of 6,1001. On Sandra, the memory latency recorded was 86 ns (nanoseconds), while the memory bandwidth was 5,766 MB/s. The bandwidth between the cache and the memory was 26 GB/s. As for how far it can go with overclocking, we didn’t try it because because vendors generally don’t encourage it. However, there were some references to sites that mentioned Kingston’s DDR3-1375 being able to reach 1,500MHz with CL8.

Kingston used the same heat spreaders that their DDR2 modules had, but Kingston has announced that their future DDR3 lineup will be equipped with a new design. They are still sticking to blue for their HyperX series.

With quad core CPUs and the X38 chipset out, it seems that DDR3 is starting to be considered as a mainstream product. If you needed to know what good DDR3 RAM is out there, Kingston is one of them without a doubt.