Kingston Impact SODIMM RAM Review: A barebones essential

Kingston Impact SODIMM RAM detailed review

You might be wondering, why on earth did we start reviewing RAM? Well, with the changing tides of the PC market, Mini-PC sales have started increasing and a lot of these Mini-PCs happen to be barebones. So you’ll want to know which RAM to get for your next Mini-PC purchase. Look no further, here’s a pretty decent candidate. 

This particular model is the Kingston HX318LS10IBK2/8 which happens to be rated for 1866 MHz CL10. It also supports two other JEDEC profiles – 1600 MHz CL9 and 1333 MHz CL8. For the uninitiated, it seems that having a greater Front Side Bus (FSB) frequency equals greater performance. 
Unfortunately, that isn’t the whole story. You need to pay attention to the latency timings as well, which in this case is indicated by the number next to CL9. 

So is it really worth getting more MHz for more money? It’s true till you hit the sweet spot, which in the case of DDR3 memory happens to be 1600 MHz, after which you get diminishing returns. However, this is the case for the average user. If your applications are more focused on memory bandwidth then more MHz is better. When we ran PCMark on the kit at 1600 MHz and 1866 MHz, the scores were only different by 2 points which is within the margin or error. But when a memory only benchmark like MaxxMem was run on the two kits, we noticed a sizeable jump in scores which amounted to 10.17 per cent. So choose your DIMM wisely.

Specifications

HX318LS10IBK2/8
Form factor: SODIMM
JEDEC Timings: DDR3-1866 CL10, DDR3-1600 CL9, DDR3-1333 CL8
Voltage: 1.35V
Height: 30mm
Heat spreader: None
 

Contact

Kingston Technology
Phone: 1860 233 4515
Email: sales_india@kingston.com,
Website: http://www.kingston.com/