Patriot Viper Gaming RGB 3200Mhz Dual Channel Memory Review

MSI X299 Gaming Pro Carbon – X299 Chipset
Intel Core i7 7740x (4.3Ghz) Quad Core 4 x 1MB L2 Cache 8MB L3 Cache
Thermaltake Water 2.0 Extreme
1x nVidia GTX 980Ti
HP dvd1260i Multiformat 24x Writer
Thermaltake Toughpower Grand 1050 Watt PSU
Windows 10 Pro 64bit

Memory Tested
2x Patriot VIPER RGB PC4-25600 16GB DDR4 (16-18-18-36)

Reference Tested
2x GeIL EVO X PC4-25600 16GB DDR4 (16-16-16-36)
2x Patriot VIPER LED PC4-25600 16GB DDR4 (16-18-18-36)

Sandra is a software collection of synthetic benchmarks that will give us a basic idea as to what a system is capable of. It should be noted that SiSoft numbers can change depending on what hardware is being tested.  These were recorded using Sandra Professional Version 24.50.2017.11

AIDA64 Extreme Edition is a streamlined diagnostic and benchmarking software package designed to assist with overclocking and general system tuning.  The package also contains modules to assess the performance of the processor, system memory, and disk drives in addition to normal stuff like stress testing and troubleshooting. 

Unigine is a synthetic benchmark much like 3DMark Vantage, but supports the newest of DirectX 11 technologies. The benchmark comes with lots of heavy tessellation and soft shadows to work the more flexible shaders found on DirectX 11 graphic cards. This makes this benchmark ideal for seeing exactly what a best case scenario might look like for a DirectX 11 capable GPU.

Benchmark Settings
HWBot Benchmark
DirectX 11 Presets
DirectX 9 Presets

PCMark 10 is an overall system benchmark to measure and compare PC performance using real-world tasks and applications. Similar to 3DMark this new version tests the entire system as a whole using applications that reflect typical PC use in the home and at the office.  This approach ensures that PCMark measures the things that matter, highlighting performance differences that will be apparent to end users and consumers.

SYSmark 2014 SE is an application-based benchmark that reflects usage patterns of business users in the areas of office productivity, media creation, and data/financial analysis and features the latest and most popular applications from each of their respective fields.  This is a Second Edition release to the popular SYSmark 2014 that works better with Windows 10.    

When you are dealing with high performance memory modules there is very little that separates them in terms of overall performance.  The charts above reflect the performance numbers between three dual channel memory kits and their XMP profiles.  The synthetic benchmark numbers reflect what you would expect, faster memory higher numbers.  The surprise comes when we look at some of the real-world benchmarks and video benchmark.

Overall the difference between the modules is quite small which is to be expected with high performance memory, especially from the same company.  PCMark 10 and Sysmark were a real surprise given that the reference memory was actually faster.  I hate to admit it but during this memory review I was also testing a "new" SSD which really impacted the overall scores.  Really this is to be expected since that benchmark tests everything from CPU to Storage with very little emphasis on memory bandwidth.