Team Group Night Hawk RGB 16GB DDR4-3000 Review

Benchmark Results & Final Analysis

With barely any flexibility to tighten timings, Mushkin’s Redline Ridgeback should prove a relatively easy mark for Night Hawk RGB to exceed. That still makes the new modules third-worst in tuning ability.

Night Hawk DDR4-3000 drops to fourth place in overclocking capability, though the difference between it, the Mushin DDR4-3200, and Team Group’s ROG DDR4-3000 is relatively small.

Amazingly, the Night Hawk RGB performed a little better at its rated (XMP) settings than at optimized DDR4-3200 timings. Perhaps that’s because the test motherboard de-optimized secondary and tertiary timings from a performance standpoint to provide better stability?

Lower is better in latency, and the Night Hawk RGB had the second-best latency reading at its DDR4-3200 optimized timings. That’s unusual given its mediocre bandwidth measurement, though the difference between its 18.5ns XMP setting and its 18.1ns at DDR4-3200 is relatively small.

F1 2015 is known to have memory bottlenecks, and the Night Hawk RGB’s best settings match only those of the other single-sided DIMMs in today’s test.

Metro Last Light is closer to the majority of games in that it has barely any preference for super fast RAM. It was in a race to the bottom with Mushkin’s similarly-configured DDR4-3200, and tied.

Blender also gets minimal improvement from super fast memory, though super slow RAM can do some damage. Though a single outlier score could be called a quirk, the Night Hawk RGB takes several one-second losses. On the other hand, a single-second loss would hardly be noticed in the real-life application of a three-minute render.

7-Zip file compression times appear strange, though somewhat close to those of the other single-sided, dual-DIMM kit in today’s test. It appears that double-sided, or four-DIMM, is the way to go in this test.

A basic performance-per-dollar analysis hurts kits where lighting or added capacity is a big part of the pricing scheme. The Trident Z has both twice the capacity, via twice the number of DIMMs, and RGB lighting.

When we adjust the performance-per-dollar rating to capacity, we still see the Trident Z RGB flailing for any sense of reasonable value against the Night Hawk RGB. Only Team Group’s own Dark ROG is capable of overtaking the value imparted by Night Hawk RGB’s relatively-reasonable price.

Crunching a few numbers, we find that Night Hawk Dark RGB modules would need to drop $16 in price to match the performance-value of the same manufacturer’s Dark ROG kit. The question remaining is whether the RGB lighting is worth that $16. And the answer for many buyers will likely be yes. At this point, I’d like to close this review with a value award. A far higher price for G.Skill’s Trident Z obviously isn’t competing for the same market, so that makes Night Hawk RGB a top-finishing value in RGB.

Unfortunately, Team Group has already pumped the idea of optimized performance via four-rank configuration in its Dark ROG memory. You’d want two Night Hawk RGB kits to achieve both the flash and dash on a Z270 motherboard. Still, value supremacy within a very narrow set of circumstances deserves, at a minimum, our stamp of approval.

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