This morning we woke up to an interesting announcement from Gigabyte: they’ve got a new Aorus RGB memory kit that comes with a so-called Memory Boost feature and demo modules, as spotted by TechPowerUp.
The memory kit comes with two 8GB modules and two "demo" modules (aka dummy modules), making for a 16GB kit. The 8GB modules run at DDR4-3600 MHz on their Intel XMP 2.0 profile, but using the Aorus Memory Boost function (simply enable it in the BIOS) can run at 3,733 MHz. The catch is that they have to be installed in a supporting motherboard and, of course, the supported boards list only includes Aorus motherboards. On all other vendor boards the modules will run at up to 3,600 MHz.
Well, that’s one way to incentivize people to buy both their RAM and motherboard from the same vendor. We're not big fans of proprietary tech, but at least Aorus' Memory Boost feature doesn't prevent users from using mismatching brands. And there isn't a particularly huge performance loss if you don't use an Aorus board.
Timings for the units sit at 18-19-19-39 at the 3,600 MHz XMP profile on Intel CPU-based platforms and 20-19-19-43 for AMD Ryzen systems (there was no information about the timings when boosted). They require 1.35V to operate.
Being Aorus products, the DIMMs also come with RGB support and are controllable via Gigabyte’s RGB Fusion 2.0 software (12 different lighting modes).
The demo modules included in one of the kits look like fully-fledged modules, but are nothing but a PCB with a lighting controller and heatsinks on it, whose only purpose is to fill the otherwise empty slots with lighting effects so that you can sit next to your PC, pleased with the illusion that this was a great way to spend your money.
Dummy Modules
We kid; we also don’t like seeing empty slots in our personal systems. However, we’re more perturbed by empty PCIe slots. Aorus, can we also get some dummy graphics cards?
Thankfully, the kit will also be available as a two-module version without the demo modules.
At the time of writing Gigabyte has not revealed any pricing or availability information yet.
