Is Kingston RAM any good?

Has anyone bought Kingston Laptop RAM? Any experience, good or bad?

 

Generally, all the big names are a safe bet. Gskill, Corsair, Crucial, OCZ, Kingston, Patriot, and PQI are the ones I can think of off the top of my head. I do suggest letting the BIOS test the memory all the way and running Memtest86 on it.

 

My brother bought some for his dv6000t and it works without any problems.

 

Kingston if fine for normal operation, its cheap and generally very reliable its just not good for performance/enthusiast ram. Meaning if you want to overclock or tighten ram timings stay away from it.

 

All I use due to their awesome warranty. They took care of a faulty piece of RAM on a Sunday evening and got back up and running 3 days later. They are usually value priced, but many makers have great products+warranties, just make sure you get a lifetime warranty, as RAM is famous for going wrong.

 

Cheap? I thought Kingston is one of the most expensive on the market. Back then, they were. They were also known as one of the best quality. I haven't follow for many years, so maybe things has changed now with so many new brand names out there.

 

@ Stew: All depends upon where you buy it. I buy my value ram at frys and it is the cheapest of anything I have seen. The same ram is marked up at BB and CC as usual.

 

Yes Kingston is one of the cheapest brands of RAM.

It also works fine for me. DId not have any memory related problems.

 

How about their HyperX Performance Memory Line?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820134661

http://www.valueram.com/datasheets/KHX5300S2LLK2_4G.pdf

 

Funny how things has changed so much in the last 5 years. Back then, when you hear Kingston, you know right away it's expensive. I still believe they're one of the best in quality, cause that's what they were known for many years. Recent years, it seems like there are many new small companies that specialized in RAM for enthusiast.

http://www.kingston.com/company/default.asp

http://www.kingston.com/company/quality.asp

They have been on top flight WAY before Corsair or OCZ even started.

 

Good article... Kingston vs. OCZ

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2007/02/23/kingston_ocz_ddr2_800_memory_review/

 

Take a look at the article I posted above, Kingston may not have the highest performance, but you can assure the quality is there. The performance numbers that OCZ and Corsair try to sell may not be that significant in real world application. For quality and compatibility wise, I'd choose Kingston over them.

 

When it comes to RAM brand means nothing really, except 3 factors.

1.) Price

2.) Warranty

3.) Testing

None of these ram companies make the ram, all they do is test it for performance, badge it with there brand, and ship it out to you.

So the way to buy RAM is to find what IC's it uses (Internal Circuts) and then read up on those specific IC's to find there general performance level (energy use, how well it overclocks, heat ect)

Once you find the IC you want, then you find the brand that uses that IC for the best price and balance it out vs there warranty. Enthusiast companies like Mushkin and OCZ offer lifetime warranties and even say its ok to overclock the ram and its still covered. Kingston may have a lifetime warranty but I do not think overclocking is covered, not that it matters because they wont know anyways unless you shoot 5x the right voltage to it and set it on fire

More detail on what I mean by testing, and the reason I say Kingston is more of a value ram and not an enthusiast ram, testing is when they run the IC thru a series of test to see what speed it runs stable, Kingston ram in general (esp the value line) they mark the ram right at the max speed mark, while enthusiast ram is tested more throughly and usually has alot more overhead left for overclocking. Its a general rule and your milage may vary.

A few years ago UCC ram came about too, meaning untested and its sold cheaper because its not tested (cheaper for the company to produce it) I think that the value level Kingston is UCC and that means they know that a given IC can within a good reason achieve a certain clock speed and thus save the time/money testing it and sell it cheaper to you, this is why it can vary so greatly in how well that ram performs, some people get lucky and get value ram that can overclock as high as the "good" stuff.

I could go into more detail but then my post would be better off as a guide and not a response to a thread.

You can know all I know just do some research on google.

 

More about Kingston...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Technology

 

Kingston does, this is why I still believe they're one of the best in quality control.

 

I dont think they do, I can swear I had some kingston ram with micron IC's in my old desktop.

I will have to look into it because they can word it to fool you, they make the "ram" because they are selling it and slaping a heat spreader on it but samsung and mircon are the 2 main guys that make all the IC's that all the ram guys actually use.

 

How about G.Skill? Are they generally more of a value RAM too?

 

I guess you're right about the IC...

http://www.kingston.com/company/quality.asp

 

Ok some google found me this link:


http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Support/Motherboard/FAQ_Model.aspx?ProductID=1361

within that thread you can find a gigabyte support guy make this statement:

so NANYA made the ram, not kingston, infact Nanya is what I have in my laptop that I am using right now its cheap Asian stuff (no offense Ken if you read this)

Im sure with more research you can find more instances of somebody taking the time to inspect the ram and find the IC's Kingston since its not an enthusiast ram is harder to find this information on because usually only enthusiast have enough knowledge to know these things or take the time to post them.

 

Aha! see my memory isn't gone yet. At any given time if you hop on newegg.com or something and look at 3 or 4 different brands of ram and you narrowed down the search to only a certain speed/type of ram (example DDR2 667mhz) and you notice the latencies and voltage are rated the same. Your looking at probably a 99% chance that all 4 brands are selling the exact same ram (the IC's again) and then you go refer to my post above and break it down to price/warranty/testing to choose the best one.

 

No G.Skill is considered one of the enthusiast brands, I had a bad run with them awhile back but that doesnt mean its bad ram I just had bad luck. After some strongly worded emails I got all my money back and even got to keep the ram so I hold no grudge against the company.

The best ram for me personally has been Mushkin, I have yet to get anything form them that didnt overclock very very high and always I was able to find what a sale on there products and get it cheap.

Corsair is the one I stay away from, they were overpriced and had a huge wave of incompatibly issues and some bad ram, they have corrected that since but in general I think they inflate there prices due to having a better known name than the other brands that use the same IC's.

 

I've 1GB of corsair and 1 GB or Kingston in my notebook

I have had the Kingston ones for just over 3 yrs and corsair for about 6 months...both working well ... ddr333 ram are expensive...

 

yeah DDR anything is expensive, same may happen to DDR2 when DDR3 becomes mainstream.

 

I currently have kingston on mine. It did show errors on memtest but it works perfectly fine. the errors i got from memtest were inconclusive

I think ill get the RAM exchanged when im about to sell the notebook

 

If you get memtest errors get rid of it asap, because memtest is not even as hard ram as some real life applications.

You can bet you will have crashes or data corruption down the road if you get memtest errors. Also speaking of memtest there is really only one test worth doing I forget what # test but its the large move test, put it on loop continuously and run it overnight while you sleep, its the "right" way to memtest, or let it run thru all test for over a day.

 

I checked what the errors meant, memtest forums noted the error was nothing, it happens sometimes.

and it only happens when i scan both sticks.. when i scan them individually they pass

makes me wonder how accurate memtest is. the results are inconsistent..

I also tried the Windows Memory tool and BIOS diagnostics, both passed. Ill return it when it starts giving me troubles.. which it hasnt so far and its been performing as it should

 

While Gskill did become popular with overclockers, they provide a good value brand also. Corsairs have their ValueSelects as their value brand.

I have heard of no such incompatibility issues with Corsair. While, true their higher priced lines are a bit "overpriced," it is a broad and unsupported statement when you mention the "huge wave of incompatibility issues"

Regardless, all memory should be tested when you receive it. No matter the brand. Memory is so sensitive to many environmental factors. And Memory errors are more common than an average user would imagine.

 

I recently got the Kingston HyperX for my laptop which run at DDR2-667 at tight 4-4-4-12 timings. They have been working well thus far, I also ran memtest and used Rightmark memory analyzer and a few other apps on it. Sisoft Sandra benchmarks also show it faster than the previous 5-5-5-15 DDR2-667 RAM I had in it before (both at 4gb). The Kingston RAM uses Elpida memory chips on it. I've used ram with Elpida chips on it before (1gb on a Dell Latitude C610 P-III 1.2ghz, and a Sonoma based Centrino P-M 2.0ghz) with good results.

 

What does CPU-Z say regarding with the SPD of your Kingston RAM? My GSKILL DDR2-667 at 4-4-4-12 SPD only has one Timing Table at 333 MHz and serial number is not detected, which is a bit odd. And what does it say about the tRC? Mine is 20, how about yours?

 

Its definitely supported, I would have to dig into the DFIStreet forums to show you the 160+ threads on it when the DFI UT Ultra-D came out nobody could get corsair ram to work and there was a wave of bad ram out shortly after.

I am not the type to make statements without proof or personal experience. In this case tho the proof you want is years old so I am not going to spend my time finding it for you if you choose not to believe me.

 

My timings are 4-4-4-12 and 15 for TRC. I actually checked the specific ns timings for the chip and they're actually on the lower end of the timing for CAS 4 (meaning tighter timings which is a good thing, they are actually only a notch above what is needed for 3-3-3 timings at 333mhz). I do have two timing tables, one for 266mhz and one for 333mhz. The 266mhz table reads 3-3-3-10 and TRC of 12. There's no way I can really tell a performance difference form my old 5-5-5-15 RAM except in synthetic benchmarks. My butt-dyno says yes though It seems to be very high quality RAM.