There is no doubting that the two leading performance memory makers at the moment are Corsair and OCZ. Both companies have been making quality memory for years now and leapfrogging each other as the performance leader with almost every new product release. Over the past few months the memory of choice in my review system has been OCZ 3200 platinum (2-2-2-5) which as well as being completely stable is the fastest PC3200 memory I’ve used. Today Corsair step up to the plate with their latest model in the XMS Xpert series. Can they compete, or beat the excellent OCZ sticks? Lets see…

The Packaging/Bundle
The sticks come in a large plastic box and are very well protected, this is mostly due to the inch thick foam that the components are laying on.

Also included in the box, other than the components is Corsairs software CD which contains the utility to configure the memory display.

The Memory
Its fair to say that the new Corsair XMS Xpert sticks are huge, almost twice the size of memory from other manufacturers.

The chips and PCB are encased in a high quality aluminium heatsink which feels well built and not at all flimsy. As you would expect the sticks are 184-pin modules so will fit any system supporting PC3200 memory. You can see on the top of the DIMM there is a set of pins, these are the connectors for your information display.

We mentioned above that the memory is much taller than standard memory, this has one major benefit. You are able to use the Xpert memory and display with any other ram and the display is raised high enough to overhang your other sticks.

The display included with this model of ram differs from previous Corsair Xpert modules. On previous models there was an LED display running along the length of the memory showing what volume of data was passing through. On the new modules there is a smaller indicator of this type as well as a more advanced LED display which displays various pieces of information on your modules (more about that in a second). Heres how the display looks from above:

Installation of the memory

Installation of the Corsair XMS Xpert memory was a breeze, the DIMMS themselves slot into your memory slots as any other memory does. The LED displays then plug into the pins which run on top of the DIMM. The sticks have also been well designed and so the displays cannot be put on the wrong way due to having one end of the PCB raised which slots into the display unit also…excellent indeed.

Once installed, the modules look like this…

Pretty cool I’m sure you will agree. That’s not where the coolness stops though. When you turn on your system you’ll love what you see…

We have a lot of UV kit in our test rig, and alongside this the Corsair Xpert memory looks pretty stunning…

As you can see from the above picture the displays are preconfigured with a message, the default message is the make and model of the memory. Also displayed are:

Frequency-

Temperature (Celcius or Fahrenheit) –

Voltage –

At the each end of the stick the corsair logo lights up blue and as mentioned earlier there is the memory use meter on the stick, shown below.

We have to be honest though, the above pics really don’t do the memory justice in terms of looks wow factor. For this you really need to see them in action… so here you go… a video of the memory running! (compressed with rar and UHARC - self extracting)

 

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