Patriot Viper LED 16GB DDR4-3600 C16 Dual-Channel Kit Review: Top-Notch Single-Rank RAM

Benchmark Results & Final Analysis

The Z370 Godlike Gaming is turning out to be far worse at configuring memory outside its SPD table than we originally thought, as the Viper LED DDR4-3600 is the second kit that it couldn’t “guess” a workable timing set for to run either DDR4-2666 or DDR4-2400. The same board does a great job configuring above-XMP settings without significant performance impact, which is the reason it was picked for this task.

Patriot’s Viper LED DDR4-3600 does scale up to DDR4-3733, so we’ll include those results in today’s charts, along with the XMP and DDR4-3200 results. Having the same lowest-stable timings at DDR4-3200 as G.Skill’s DDR4-3200, we’re keenly interested in how the secondary and tertiary timings we didn’t choose will separate the two kits in our benchmarks.

The Viper LED’s DDR4-3771 capability earns it overclocking cred. The older DDR4-3200 modules that hit 3808 are getting hard to find, and we can’t live too far in the past. (We must forget them when they’re gone.)

The Viper LED’s mic drop comes when it matches G.Skill’s DDR4-3866 Sandra Memory Bandwidth at XMP settings, then blows past it at DDR4-3733. If your system turns out not to be so friendly to those high data rates, its DDR4-3200 performance edges out that of the Ripjaws V.

We probably shouldn’t be surprised that the DDR4-3200 kits have lower DDR4-3200 latency than the Viper LED DDR4-3600, since faster memory uses looser secondary and tertiary timings to maintain stability. We should probably throw a game at this kit and see what happens.

F1 2015 gets a big boost from the Viper LED’s combination of frequency and timings, even surpassing the XMP settings of the old dual-rank DIMMs. The dual-rank kit edges ahead, barely, at optimized DDR4-3200 timings.

Metro only faults slow RAM, and we haven’t included any in today’s test. The Viper LED does well, for what it’s worth in this bench.

Blender’s another application that really only weeds out slow RAM. We include these to show readers how most applications will respond to their enthusiast-class purchase.

Lower is better in timed apps, and once again the Viper LED edges out the otherwise superb dual-rank DIMMs. Manual tuning helps the dual-rank kit take the win, for those who are adept to both find and tune it.

The penalty for performance in the case of the Viper LED DDR4-3600 kit is around $40, pulling it down in the performance-per-dollar chart. The winning kits are in short supply, however, and don’t even have those LEDs (if you want them). That said, the Viper LED kit has the best performance of any single-rank modules we’ve tested, usually beating the barely available dual-rank modules, and will continue to be a good choice long after those dual-rank DIMMs are gone.

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