Patriot Viper 4 8GB DDR4-3200 CL16 Memory Kit Review

Performance

There were little changes in the test setup since last memory review but shouldn’t affect performance. ASUS motherboard has been replaced with ASRock Z170 OC Formula which is probably the best motherboard for overclocking right now. It’s also great to test various PC components.

Other test platform components remain without changes so we have i7 6700K processor and ASUS Strix GTX980 graphics card but also Samsung SSD on which is installed Windows 10 Pro x64. Nothing unusual and easy to compare by all our readers who own similar computer.

Now let’s take a look how Patriot Viper 4 memory is performing.

At the beginning bandwidth benchmarks but we will start from AIDA64 which is performing multithreaded tests. Patriot Viper 4 DDR4-3200 memory kit is performing good in this test. It could be better at higher memory frequency but it’s not bad for DDR4-3200 memory and it’s even better than expected.

Intel Skylake platform is scalling really good with memory frequency so it’s normal that in synthetic memory bandwidth tests higher frequency memory has much higher bandwidth.

MaxxMem Preview is showing us similar situation but in single threaded environment. Also here Patriot Viper 4 is performing well.

After bandwidth tests we can check how Patriot memory is acting in Pi calculation based on multithreaded version of really popular benchmark – SuperPi. Results are good. Even though the Viper 4 has lower frequency than Geil memory in comparison, it performs almost as good. We can also see much bigger difference between Patriot and all lower frequency memory kits.

In rendering benchmarks like Cinebench R15 we won’t see big differences between memory kits but it’s still visible. Patriot DDR4-3200 memory kit is performing great in this test again reaching about as good result as Geil DDR4-3333 memory kit. Both kits have similar main timings so I guess that sub timings make the difference here.

In gaming benchmarks like 3DMark performance of Patriot Viper 4 is also good. There are no performance drops what would suggest instability. Simply everything is perfect.

In both Futuremark benchmarks we can’t see big difference because of memory performance. At the same time both can be used to check stability of the memory as tests take a lot of time and are using large amounts of memory.

In PCMark 8 we can see differences mainly in Home preset. All tests were run in Conventional mode which shouldn’t be affected by additional acceleration and we still can’t see big differences in these tests. Memory is simply fast enough for all the tests.

General performance of Patriot Viper 4 2x4GB DDR4-3200 memory kit is really good. During all tests it was performing not much slower than the higher frequency Geil memory which we used in our comparison. At the same time price of Patriot memory kit is noticable lower so gamers can decide to invest some more in good graphics card or other components without sacrificing memory performance.

If you still need higher performance then check our overclocking results.

Overclocking

Overclocking is never guaranteed so the presented results may vary from results on other memory kits. I am not recommending overclocking if you do not know what are you doing. High voltages may damage hardware and it will not be covered by warranty.

As it was mentioned at the beginning of the review, Patriot Viper 4 base on Samsung IC so we can count it will be scalling good with voltage. However too high voltage is never good so presented results are at no more than 1.50V.

Below you can see screenshot from AIDA64 stability test. Patriot Viper 4 DDR4-3200 could run at CL14-16-16 and tighter sub timings but required mentioned 1.50V. This is the best performing setting possible on our review sample.

You can also count on these settings:

• 2900 15-15-15 1.35V
• 3050 13-16-16 1.50V
• 3050 15-16-16 1.35V
• 3200 16-16-16 1.35V
• 3200 14-16-16 1.50V
• 3466 16-18-18 1.35V
• 3466 15-18-18 1.50V

All above settings passed AIDA64 stability test or various other benchmarks so are stable or close to stability. Depends from luck you may get better overclocking Patriot Viper 4 memory kit.

Overall I was counting on some more but can’t complain as these settings are already good and even at XMP profile performance is really high.