The Low Rider from Corsair now comes bundled with a cooler! But is it the complete package?
We all know that Corsair is a brand that outshines when it comes to cooling devices for PC namely in the form of their Hydro series CPU liquid coolers and the same can be said for it memory kit lineups which has gems like the premium Dominator and the infamous Vengeance LPX.
Following the same trend Corsair decided to converge the two worlds together and bring out a bundle known as the Corsair Vengeance Airflow which thanks to Corsair India is on our table right now for review!
The Corsair Vengeance LPX Airflow is basically a bundle of the Vengeance LPX memory kit along with the Vengeance Airflow memory cooler. We have with us the Vengeance LPX 16GB 3600Mhz kit rated at 18-19-19-39 at 1.35v along with the generic Airflow cooler which is backed up by two years of warranty. Pricing of this bundle is not yet out but we'll update you once we have any words upon the same but its definitely expected to be lower than the two modules bought separately.
What's in the Box!?
The bundle comes in a grey box which is the signature color scheme of the Corsair Vengeance LPX Memory kits along with the rendered image of the RAM and product name neatly printed right and occupying most of the front fascia. An atrociously small image of the Vengeance Airflow is at the left hand side, yeah right there that tiny little insect thing on the box you see, that's the cooler!
Open the box and you'll find yourself a cardboard case holding everything in place, greeting you with the quick start guide. Inside we have two 8GB sticks of Corsair Vengeance LPX Memory, the Vengeance Airflow cooler, interchangeable color accent covers, two mounting brackets, speed control cable and a quick start guide. All you'll miss is a decal from Corsair since everything else you need is right there in the box!
Up Close with the Vengeance!
Looking at the RAM the first thing you notice is that its subtle with no flashy designs or RGB lighting. This not only makes it one of the most technically compatible RAMs out there but also the most compatible one in terms of aesthetics especially since they are available in four color variants namely as red, black, white and blue. These are just 31mm tall making them highly compatible with beefy air coolers such as the Noctua NH-D14 and have a pure aluminum low profile heatsink throughout the PCB for maximum contact and heat dissipation.
Ours is a CMK16GX4M2B3600C18 kit consisting of two sticks of 8GB each and are rated for 3600Mhz at 18-19-19-39 with 1.35v upon enabling the XMP profile. With an eight layer PCB populated by Hynix memory chips I'm really excited to explore the overclocking potential of this kit. Also the Corsair Vengeance LPX is compatible with Intel 100 and 200 series chipsets, X99 platforms and even the latest X299 platforms.
Turning our gaze towards the Vengeance Airflow we get it in a couple of components with the main unit made up of the aluminum shroud and fan, the mounting brackets that have two bend feet for MSI, Gigabyte, AsRock etc while a straight foot for Asus motherboards, a set of screws, two swappable silver and blue shrouds to match the cooler with the color scheme of the memory sticks. Also there is a speed control cable that if used will bring down the rated speed of the cooler fan from 3500RPM to 2500RPM for a quieter experience though I prefer to control the fan speed from the BIOS itself!
The fan in the Vengeance Airflow is a 60mm ball bearing brushless fan rated at 3500RPM with 25dB maximum. Its a brushless fan the same that are used in RC Aircrafts as they can produce very high RPM at a smaller physical size & less power consumption so the air flow should be optimum.
Installation and Benchmarks
Installing the Corsair Vengeance LPX Memory Kit was simple and once seated the memory looks just amazing! Anyone who values subtle aesthetics would appreciate the finish and appearance of this kit especially on an all black build such as the one that we've used it with. The modules are low in height and pose absolutely no obstruction with the surrounding hardware.
At first I was a bit apprehensive about installing the Vengeance Airflow since the MSI X299 SLI Plus has a debug LED display right above the DIMM slots and I deemed it to be an obstruction for the cooler's feet but man its a well thought about and made into design! The Vengeance Airflow slid in without any issues whatsoever and gripped the DIMM slot holders rightly with its rubber coated feet notch to cavity! There is ample of free space between the Vengeance LPX memory and the Vengeance Airflow as we can see from the side to maximize airflow and heat dissipation.
Its also noticeable that even though the Vengeance Airflow is tall once assembled and fitted in place the cooler has absolutely no interference with the Cooler Master MasterLiquid Pro 280 CPU Liquid Cooler installed next to it, which happens to have one of the tallest pump units amongst all the liquid coolers out there. Also the cooler can be slid to further right side if required to make room for air coolers such as the Hyper 212X or the Thermaltake Contac Silent 12. I'm highly impressed by the universal compatibility of the Vengeance Airflow over here.
For the benchmarks we used the following test setup configuration --
CPU: Intel Core i7 7800X
Motherboard: MSI X299 SLI Plus
RAM: Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB DDR4 3600Mhz
Cooler: Cooler Master MasterLiquid Pro 280
Graphics Card: Gigabyte GTX 1050Ti G1 Gaming OC
Storage: Corsair Neutron GTX 480 480GB
Secondary Storage: ADATA XPG SX8000 256GB M.2 SSD
Power Supply: Cooler Master MasterWatt Lite 700
OS: Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
GPU Driver: ForceWare 375.70
BIOS: 1.20
Plugging in the Vengeance and booting into Windows was a breeze and it immediately picked up the XMP 2.0 profile once enabled through the BIOS bringing the kit to the rated 3600Mhz at 18-19-19-39 with 1.35v. CPUZ isn't able to report the timings correctly on the RAM since the BIOS for the X299 platform are still getting mature but other suits such as AIDA64 CPUID report correct timings.
When it comes to overclocking DDR4 memory I follow one rule only, that is not to exceed the 1.5v barrier and try to stay below that as much as possible to deliver results that are safe for real world usage and can be implemented on a 24x7 basis. To overclock the Corsair Vengeance LPX I managed a stable 3800Mhz at 18-18-18-38 with 1.4v anything above that was just not possible for booting into Windows or running any benchmark whatsoever. The heatspreaders on the Vengeance do a wonderful job in keeping these kits cool and with the added Vengeance Airflow cooler it came down even further.
Our benchmarks would be done at the default 3600Mhz and 3800Mhz overclocked frequency along with the Intel i7 7800X at 4.5Ghz to avoid any kind of bottleneck.
AIDA64 Cache and Memory Benchmark
AIDA64 Extreme Edition is a great tool to bench your CPU and RAM in terms of their read-write-copy abilities. Its clear that the Corsair Vengeance LPX is offering similar to better performance than competing memory kits, the only competition is from the Galax HOF kit.
7-zip
7zip is a compression and decompression program that utilizes the processing power of the CPU alone. It is a synthetic benchmark that gives results very close to real life scores. A similar result can be seen over here aswell.
wPrime v2.10
wPrime is a leading multithreaded benchmark for x86 processors that tests your processor performance by calculating square roots with a recursive call of Newton’s method for estimating functions.
SuperPi Mod v1.5
SuperPi is a simple program that utilizes the processing power and memory speed of the system to calculate the value of Pi upto 1 Million or 32 Million decimal point depending upon what you choose. The time is calculated in minutes and seconds, we'll take them both in seconds, so lower the score faster is your computer.
Cinebench R11.5 and Cinebench R15
Cinebench uses Maxon's Cinema 4D engine to render a photo-realistic scene of some shiny balls and weird things (we miss the motorbike). The scene is highly complex, with reflections, ambient occlusion and procedural shaders so it gives a CPU a tough workout.
As Cinema 4D is a real-world application - used on films such as Spider-Man and Star Wars - Cinebench can be viewed as a real-world benchmark.
3DMark Fire Strike
Fire Strike by 3D Mark is a test suit that plays a cinematic scene to determine the FPS, GPU temperature and CPU temperature scaling everything via a cumulative score. It is a great tool to benchmark your GPU since the render is GPU dependent.
Update
Let's test it on Ryzen!
On popular demand we've tested the Corsair Vengeance LPX Airflow on our newly build AMD Ryzen platform to give all of you an idea of how this memory performs when coupled with a Ryzen CPU, which is quite a logical question indeed considering how successful and impressive the AMD Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 5 Platforms have been.Our test bench for this part of the review is as follows -
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 1700
Motherboard: Asus X370 Crosshair VI Hero
RAM: Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB DDR4 3600Mhz
Cooler: Cooler Master MasterLiquid Pro 280
Graphics Card: Gigabyte GTX 1050Ti G1 Gaming OC
Storage: Corsair Neutron GTX 480 480GB
Secondary Storage: ADATA XPG SX8000 256GB M.2 SSD
Power Supply: Cooler Master MasterWatt Lite 700
OS: Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
GPU Driver: ForceWare 375.70
BIOS: 1403
We all are already aware of the memory frequency issue that Ryzen platforms have as of now but my Asus X370 Crosshair VI Hero with its latest BIOS update managed to get the memory kit at 3466Mhz at 18-21-21-49 at 1.35v which I'm sure can be tightened further upon in terms of timings but we didn't have much time to test this memory on Ryzen properly so pardon me for that. The system was perfectly stable and I kept the AMD Ryzen 7 1700 at 3.8Ghz to avoid any bottlenecks in performance.
Even upon AMD Ryzen the Corsair Vengeance LPX Airflow shows impressive performance which rubs shoulder with Intel at even lower frequencies indicating towards a similar to better real world performance especially when the memory would work at its full potential of 3600Mhz!
My Verdict
Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB 3600Mhz Memory Kit is one of the most versatile kits out there and its proven yet again by our benchmarks where it displays unmatched compatibility with the X299 platform. The kit looks great and would appeal to those who value elegance over bling making it a great option for system builder. Overclocking wise the kit is just perfect and achieving 3800Mhz at just 1.4v which is 5.5% increase over its default frequency is nothing short of amazing since we are already in the upper 3000Mhz range here, this high frequency won't matter much in gaming but in graphic editing or rendering it can make a world of difference.The Vengeance Airflow bundled with the memory kit is an added advantage that not only imparts good looks to the entire system but also keeps these high end memories cool even under the heaviest of loads, one of the prime reasons why this kit performed so well in the benchmarks is the cooler which kept it cool all the time.
"Being one of the most compatible memories out there, across all platforms including AMD Ryzen, with subtle looks and a performance to woo in even the most hardcore enthusiasts, the Corsair Vengeance LPX is highly recommended for PC modders, graphic designers and even gamers who don't mind shelling out extra for that extra performance."
Pros - - Subtle Looks
- High compatibility with various platforms
- Good Overclocking headroom
- Vengeance Airflow Cooler works well
Cons -
- High Pricing
I give it a 8/10 earning our Gold Award!
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