Conclusion
Geil took a big risk sending us its latest DDR4 memory product, but did it pay off? We’d love to say yes because we really get bored with the decidedly non-risky products its competitors submit.
Unfortunately, the Super Luce DDR4-3400 modules rely on the bad behavior of motherboard companies to work. That is, while most board vendors have been cheating on DIMM voltage for a long time—sneaking in a little extra to win stability tests or make flaky modules function—the Super Luce DDR4-3400 kit actually requires the extra “cheat voltage” to function at its rated settings. Put another way, the Super Luce 1.35V DDR4 kit actually needs around 1.375 volts to run at XMP settings, and is certified only for motherboards that output around 1.375V when set to 1.350 volts. No big deal?
This could be a big deal if your motherboard outputs only 1.36 volts when set to 1.35 volts. The overclocking gods demand that your board actually generates the voltage you set it to. And what if you have a CPU that doesn’t respond well to the extra DIMM voltage on a platform that isn't completely honest? You’d better be prepared to go searching for a memory controller voltage level that compensates.
At only $320 a set, the Super-Luce DDR4-3400 is still far cheaper than the memory it competes against most directly (Klevv Cras). It also overclocks a little better. And while the light bars and heat spreaders look cheaper, the light spreaders perform a secondary function of indicating temperature.
Though the Super Luce DDR4-3400 kit wasn’t stable at XMP settings on our hardware, we can already hear value-seeking overclockers screaming back at us “but it’s cheaper and clocks higher than its closest competitor”. And so it does.
Update 5-19-2015:
Geil contacted us following this evaluation to announce that its Super-Luce DDR4-3400 memory kit is now approved exclusively for the Gigabyte X99 SOC Champion with firmware F4G. They are working with MSI and Asus directly to develop firmware settings to stabilize these at data rates of DDR4-3400 and beyond.
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Thomas Soderstrom is a Senior Staff Editor at Tom's Hardware, covering Cases, Cooling,Memory and Motherboards. Follow him on Twitter.