Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB

SCORE

PRICE £63 (£76 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk

The Vengeance LPX kit is one of the most popular RAM sets, which is no wonder considering its low

£76 price. Its budget leanings deliver a more modest design than others here, with black heatspreaders and little ornamentation.

When it comes to its spec, though, the Corsair kit impresses with a 3,000MHz clock speed and the best timing figures in the group. Those translate to great performance. In our real-world benchmarks, the Corsair returned scores of 186 and 325 in the image and video-editing tests – the former is the best here and the latter is only beaten by Crucial’s 32GB kit.

The Corsair’s overall result of 331 is only outpaced by that 32GB Crucial offering and by HyperX’s 16GB kit, which runs at 3,200MHz. The Corsair’s Cinebench scores are the pick of the group, and its Geekbench results are the best from any 16GB kit.

Its 24,812 Fire Strike score is reasonable, but it was only mediocre in Tomb Raider. Its theoretical tests were middling – unable to keep up with the 3,200MHz HyperX kit or the 32GB Crucial offering.

Those theoretical results don’t always translate to real-world ability, though, and this kit has plenty of that. The real-world results and price make the Vengeance LPX a superb choice for day-to-day computing.

2 x 8GB DIMMs 3,000MHz DDR4 dual/ quad-channel configuration 15-17-17-35 timings 1.35V voltage part number: CMK16GX4M2B3000C15

The Vengeance RGB Pro kit is the boldest-looking memory in this group. Its heatspreaders are the tallest here and they’re topped with a thick band of RGB LED lighting. A Windows app can program complex effects and synchronise the RGB LEDs with other Corsair products.

This 16GB Vengeance kit runs at 3,000MHz, but its timings are a step or two behind the cheaper Corsair Vengeance LPX kit and the HyperX Fury gaming RAM.

That didn’t affect it in our gaming tests: minimum and average frame rates of 114fps and 150fps in Tomb Raider are the best in the group, and its 3DMark Fire Strike score of 24,741 isn’t far behind the leaders. However, this kit struggled in application tests. Its overall real-world result of 323 is the poorest from any kit running at 3,000MHz or higher. In Cinebench and Geekbench, its singlethreaded results were mid-table but its multicore results were poor.

Its underwhelming timings explain those application scores, and they also contributed to weak theoretical results

– it has the worst transaction throughput in the group. If you’re building a spectacular gaming rig, the Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro 16GB is the kit to choose. If not, you should look elsewhere.

2 x 8GB DIMMs 3,000MHz DDR4 dual/ quad-channel configuration 16-20-20-38 timings 1.35V voltage part number: CMW16GX4M2D3000C16

This is the most expensive kit in the group, which is no surprise – it’s the only 32GB kit here. Home users, gamers and those running conventional work tools don’t need this much, but 32GB of memory is beneficial for certain high-end tasks such as 4K video editing, database work and CAD tools – applications that are usually deployed on workstations.

This Ballistix kit is clocked to a rapid 3,200MHz. The speed and capacity jump had no real impact in our single-threaded image-editing test, but the Ballistix kit recorded the best results in the rest of our real-world benchmarks.

The Ballistix memory only returned a mediocre score in Cinebench’s single-core test, but it was the fastest in the multicore test. It was quick in Geekbench too – its multicore result of 9,439 was almost 1,000 points beyond the best 16GB kit.

The kit delivered improvements in most of our theoretical tests, with impressive leaps in bandwidth benchmarks. This isn’t the memory to buy for gaming, though – it’s underwhelming here and few games will make use of the extra capacity.

This memory delivers a smaller improvement over 16GB kits in mainstream benchmarks and larger gains in tougher applications – and in theoretical tests. Not everyone needs this much memory, but if you do the Ballistix kit is a great example.

2 x 16GB DIMMs 3,200MHz DDR4 dual/ quad-channel configuration 16-18-18-36 timings 1.35V voltage part number: BL2K16G32C16U4B