CES 2015 Las Vegas, NV Caesar’s Palace
One company that we always are sure to visit during CES is Kingston. Over the years they have had a number of interesting demos and products that are dropped on the world during CES. This year was no exception. David Leong was quick to get into the meat of the presentation and showed off the next generation of the Cloud gaming headset. This new headset features 53mm drivers and a power USB audio adapter to push 7.1 virtual surround sound.

Samsung has started mass production of 4 Gb DDR3 memory chips in 20-nanometer manufacturing process.  According to the manufacturer, production of DRAM chips in fewer nanometer technology is more demanding job in relation to the NAND flash memory chips. While NAND in every cell requires only a transistor, 0DRAM memory must have both transistor and capacitor.

Patriot Viper 3 Low Profile memory comes in three different capacities. The smallest kit of 8GB, medium one with 16GB and the largest one with 32GB. Low Profile of the name refers to the height of memory which is 1.25 inches (3.17 cm). Memory supports speeds of 1600 MHz, 1866 MHz and 2133 MHz and is XMP 1.3 certified.

Corsair has introduced the Extreme Vengeance DDR3 memory kit, which is currently the fastest available memory module. It is a dual-channel DDR3 memory kit with two plates of 4 GB (8 GB total) that run on a standard clock speed of up to 3000 MHz at voltage of 1.65 V and 12-14-14-36 latency.

Over the weekend rumors popped up that nVidia was preparing to begin a full recall on all Kepler based products. The rumor cited a leak from TSMC stating that Kepler “chips may be suffering from serious performance degradation over long periods of heavy load”. This sounds almost exactly like what came out of “sources” at TSMC during the “bumpgate” issue that happened when the solder bumps in certain GPUs were failing due to degradation over multiple heat cycles. However, does this rumor have any truth to it? Or are we seeing a return to the days of Guerilla marketing like we did in the early 2000s.

During our coverage of Intel’s Ivy Bridge and in particular our coverage of Asus’ Z77 based motherboards we mentioned that Asus was already starting to use a new tracing layout to deal with increasing memory speeds. The new memory they were working towards was not only DDR3 (up to 3200MHz) but also DDR4. It is a good thing they have already started working on this as we now hear that Micron has working DDR4 memory modules.

After our first run through with the Kingston HyperX SH100S3B 120GB SSD we had more than a few comments stating that 120GB was just not enough to work with. Although your typical 120GB drive is intended to be used as a boot drive with some basic applications installed on this drive it is not meant to be the only drive. Well people still did not want to hear about that so we managed to arrange to take a peek at Kingston’s next upgrade kit, the HyperX 3K 240GB upgrade kit which comes with a HyperX SH103S3 240GB SSD drive along with pretty much the same goodies you saw in the 120GB kit. So let’s take a quick look at what you have and then dive straight into performance.

The net is full of articles talking about how this or that technology company is controlling their software, hardware, IP (Intellectual Property) or some other item that they want to complain about. You also cannot run a search on net-neutrality, DCMA, MPAA, RIAA, Pirate Bay or, of course Apple without hearing about how medieval and out dated their concepts of fair usage is. I have talked about this kind of corporate control for years as well. It I oppressive, stifles the market and Hurst consumers. However, there is one type of control that is good for the consumer. This is the type of control that Kingston is holding over their ValueRAM Server Premier memory.  What Kingston has done is take their already great server memory and add an extra level of quality control to ensure maximum performance and stability. They have done this by controlling every part that goes into this product right down to the revision of chip die. Let’s take a quick look at how this works and what it means to the consumer and enterprise.