Patriot Viper Steel RGB UDIMM 16GB Kit, DDR4-3600, CL20-26-26-46

The reviewed Patriot Viper Steel RGB comes with a default frequency (3600 MHz) that in theory should be enough for the majority of users, but the XMP 2.0 profile that’s supposed to make your life easier also forces very poor latencies. If you’re not just in it for the looks, you can try (or should I say need) to overclock this memory a bit. With the reviewed kit, on our X470 and Z390 platforms, it was possible to achieve 4000 MHz with CL19 on the Intel system, whereas on the AMD one we stayed at 3600 Mhz to keep the Infinity Fabric divider at 1:1, but with optimized timings and CL16. It’s a very nice result. We didn’t expect that, especially looking at the default CL20 timings. You could achieve even more with a Z490 system, though, but we don’t have that on our test bench (yet). Either way, you need to remember that reproducibility is never guaranteed, and your results may vary. Moving on to compatibility, the heat spreader is a relatively low-profile one (44 mm), so you shouldn’t encounter any clearance problems with most CPU coolers. The 32 GB capacity may seem a lot to most users nowadays, but it’s becoming more common due to dropping RAM prices (that might actually change soon). The 2 x 16 GB kit is priced at ~145 USD, which is rather reasonable, but you need to remember that in the default state the performance will be rather disappointing due to the timings saved in the XMP. It’s a product that gave us a mixed bag of emotions, but in the end, we decided to give Patriot a “Guru3D approved” award for this great-looking kit. The deciding factor here wasn’t the poor default timings, of course, but the performance after a bit of tweaking. Users who like to dabble in the fine art of ram overclocking will have no problem unlocking this product’s full potential. And if you’re not interested in performance but just love the looks, you don’t really care about that anyway. Bottom line: it’s a good kit with one major flaw (timings) that can be fixed easily, and frankly, we wonder why Patriot didn’t do that themselves.