First things first. The shipping (because the shipping is obviously a critical part of the Amazon experience). I ordered this from antonline because their feedback seemed so overwhelmingly positive. I didn't really expect the shipping to be all that fast (especially for free shipping) and it wasn't. It took several days. Which is not terrible (in the context of the fact that Amazon orders seem to be taking longer and longer these days).
The problem was the tracking. It was fairly accurate in when it said it was going to be here but it was also pretty vague. For a few days, it just said "Shipped" and "In transit" or something like that. I had no clue where it shipped from or where on earth it was. I could only use the vague estimate of "It'll probably be there sometime between these five days" to try and know when to be ready for it.
And I mean, let's be honest here. This isn't a pack of socks. This is a delicate computer part. It's not terribly expensive but it's 40 bucks. It's not the kind of thing you want to play around with.
Well, OK. So, at the end, it took about 4 days and Amazon's tracking info didn't really give me any specific details of exactly where it was until the very last day when it was out for delivery. If I hadn't been home that day, I would have obviously missed the delivery.
SO......the product itself? Seems fine. I'm not super knowledgeable about RAM or specs or any of that. But here is my basic system (for reference).
Motherboard - Gigabyte G1 Sniper A88X (With the latest F11 BIOS)
APU - AMD A10 7860K
Samsung 850 Evo SSD
Seasonic 550 watt Gold PSU
The memory I was replacing was 6 gigs of generic Kingston 1600 RAM that came with a system I bought years ago. Much was made of the fact that you should just be able to pop this HyperX Fury in and have your BIOS change all the settings for you. Which is true (kinda). It did indeed show up as 1866 RAM as soon as I rebooted.
However, I wasn't all that sure I was getting better performance. In fact, something about the system seemed a bit laggy. I thought this was probably just my imagination but I started looking around in the BIOS. I noticed the Northbridge frequency was set at 1600. I started doing some benchmarks just to see if I could see any performance drop and I did notice that it said the RAM was slower than it should be.
I debated whether or not to risk raising the northbridge frequency as I had heard somewhere that it should be at least equal to your RAM speed. I don't know where I read that and couldn't find it again when I was looking for it. But I finally tried it and the benchmark scores definitely went up for the RAM. So I can only assume that you will not get the advertised speed out of this RAM if your northbridge frequency remains at 1600 (Someone please comment on this and let me know if I'm right or wrong here).
Of course this site I was using for benchmarks was comparing my scores to those everyone else was getting with the same RAM. It is likely most of those people were overclocking their systems to the max. Still, the RAM scores I was getting right out of the gate were well below what seemed normal and they jumped considerably when I changed the northbridge to 1900.
I even tried reloading the optimized defaults for my motherboard so the BIOS would automatically choose the settings for the APU and RAM. The northbridge frequency auto set itself to 1600 on this MB. So I don't really know if this is correct to change this setting. Don't take my word for it because I don't know anything, really. Just that I got significantly better scores when I changed the freauency. I did not change the frequency for the RAM, as I wanted to see if the northbridge setting seemed to be the bottleneck and it appears to be.
| RAM | 16 GB DDR3 |
|---|---|
| Memory Speed | 1866 MHz |
| Wireless Type | Radio Frequency |
