Lexar Hades RGB DDR4 Review

Lexar is pretty well known for memory products from flash memory cards to actual laptop and desktop ram. However, ‘gaming’ oriented products have never really been in the portfolio…until now. Introducing the Hades RGB DDR4 memory from Lexar. Featuring everything a gamer needs, from XMP 2.0 overclocking profiles to sleek aluminum heat spreaders, and even the ‘gaming’ requisite RGB lighting, Lexar’s new Hades RGB gaming memory is ready to help you send your digital enemies to meet the Greek god of the underworld. Let’s check it out! PC Test Bench would like to thank Lexar for providing us a Hades RGB kit to check out! What Lexar has to say about the Hades RGB memory family: The Lexar Hades RGB DDR4 overclocked memory is the perfect upgrade for the gamer who wants next-level performance and an improved gaming experience. And with Lexar RGB Sync, bring your system to life with customizable RGB lighting controls. Light up every moment The Lexar Hades RGB DDR4 refreshes and enhances your gameplay with vibrant colors of RGB lighting effects. The RGB lights create a lively atmosphere rendering your gameplay more realistic and adds a touch of style to your gaming journey. Speed up your gameplay with quicker response time Level up your gaming experience with the Lexar Hades RGB DDR4 overclocked memory. Sync and customize your RGB lighting effects With Lexar RGB Sync, a powerful RGB lighting control software, you can synchronize your lighting effects by setting color, intensity, and speed. You can save your lighting effect profiles as well. The Lexar Hades RGB DDR4 is also compatible with the RGB control software of major motherboard brands. Supports XMP 2.0 The Lexar Hades RGB DDR4 is compatible with latest INTEL XMP 2.0 and AMD Ryzen to optimize and enhance your gaming experience. Keep your game cool and steady The Lexar Hades RGB DDR4 is designed with a sleek aluminum heat spreader to keep your system cool for you to run your game. Rigorously tested All Lexar product designs undergo extensive testing in the Lexar Quality Labs, facilities with more than 1,100 digital devices, to ensure performance, quality, compatibility, and reliability. FEATURES: Vibrant RGB colors let you enjoy an interactive gaming experience Level up your gaming experience with DDR4 overclocked performance Lexar RGB Sync allows you to synchronize your RGB lighting controls Optimized with latest Intel XMP 2.0 and supports AMD Ryzen platform Heat dissipation to keep things cool Lifetime limited warranty SPECIFICATIONS: Capacity: 8GB,16GB, 16GB kit (2 x 8GB), 32GB kit (2x16GB) XMP Frequency: (3600MHz) XMP Timings: 18-22-22-42 Tested Voltage for Profile 1: 1.35V Format: NON-ECC Unbuffered DIMM Pin Out: 288-Pin A Closer Look Lexar’s Hades RGB memory comes in a small box typical of memory kits. It is printed in full color and shows the kit details in the lower right corner. The back is mostly a blurb about the Hades RGB memory in a few languages, with some basic specs towards the bottom. The Hades RGB memory is very sleek, a smooth, brushed, black anodized heat spreader covers the entire stick. A milky white translucent bar runs along the top. Both sides are identical sans the small spec label on one side that lists specs and the serial number. Lexar certainly follows the mantra of ‘less is more’ and it looks great. The top edge of the light diffuser bar has the Lexar logo carved in it, but you have to be looking for it to notice it. The lighting effect is pretty well diffused, the camera just barely picking up a bloom around each LED that is difficult to see in person. Software & Performance Testing Testing Hardware: ASRock Z590 Taichi Intel Core i9-11900K Kingston KC2000 1TB 32GB (2x16GB) Lexar Hades RGB 3600MHz Testing Software: Microsoft Windows 10 Professional 20H2 Thaiphoon Burner CPU-Z AIDA64 Extreme Edition Passmark Performance Test 10 SiSoft Sandra Lexar RGB Sync Lexar’s RGB Sync program is simple but efficiently covers all the needed bases. You get 15 preset lighting effects to choose from, and you can adjust raw values for each of the individual LEDs. Four user-selectable profile saves are available at the top, as well as a single button to disable lighting completely. CPU-Z is a freeware that gathers information on some of the main devices of your system: Processor name and number, codename, process, package, cache levels. Mainboard and chipset. Memory type, size, timings, and module specifications (SPD). Real-time measurement of each core's internal frequency, memory frequency. CPUz shows us we have a single XMP profile available at 3600MHz effective at 18-22-22-42 at 1.35V. It’s also worth noting that it supports non-overclocked JEDEC speeds up to 3200MHz. Thaiphoon Burner Thaiphoon Burner is the number one solution on the software market to work with SPD firmware of DRAM modules of PC. Thaiphoon Burner provides powerful features for reading, modifying, updating, and reprogramming SPD firmware of SPD EEPROM devices. The program fully supports all popular JEDEC standards for Serial Presence Detects and third-party enhancements, such as NVIDIA EPP and Intel XMP. Comparing to other software Thaiphoon Burner creates the most completed reports for any of the following SDRAM types of DIMM modules: PC SDRAM, DDR SDRAM, DDR2 SDRAM, DDR3 SDRAM, DDR2 FB-DIMM, DDR4 SDRAM, LPDDR3, and LPDDR4. This is achieved due to the universal built-in SPD decoding engine. Thaiphoon shows us Lexar is utilizing eight of its own in-house DRAM modules configured in a single rank. Here is the full readout if you want to look deep into the specs. AIDA64 Engineer Edition “AIDA64 Engineer has a hardware detection engine unrivaled in its class. It provides detailed information about installed software and offers diagnostic functions and support for overclocking. As it is monitoring sensors in real-time, it can gather accurate voltage, temperature, and fan speed readings, while its diagnostic functions help detect and prevent hardware issues. It also offers a couple of benchmarks for measuring the performance of individual hardware components or the whole system. It is compatible with all 32-bit and 64-bit Windows editions, including Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016.” Bandwidth measured by AIDA64 falls in about where we expect it to compared to similar kits. Latency on the other hand does a bit better than expected with our testbed registering 60.9 nanoseconds, a fair bit faster than we would expect from a kit like this. Passmark Performance Test - Memory Mark - Threaded “Fast, easy to use, PC speed testing, and benchmarking. PassMark Performance Test 10 allows you to objectively benchmark a PC using a variety of different speed tests and compare the results to other computers.” Passmark gives the Hades RGB a threaded memory test score of 51,244 points, the best score we’ve seen from a 3600Mhz kit by a small margin. SiSoft Sandra “SiSoftware Sandra provides a robust package of diagnostic tools for testing your system and teasing out its problems--or potential headaches.” SiSoft shows an aggregate memory bandwidth of 42.86 GB/s which is really good for a 3600MHz memory kit. Overclocking While everyone technically overclocks system memory when activating the XMP profile, not many will manually overclock beyond that. We always like to give it a try though. We were able to step up to 3733Mhz without touching any other settings. This gives us a bit higher read speeds and around 2.5GB/s more write bandwidth. Latency drops from 60.9ns to 58.7ns. We were further able to step up to 3800MHz by bumping voltage a small amount to 1.37V and got a bit more bandwidth on both sides. Latency fell to 58ns even. However, we were unable to get any further. The system would happily POST at 4000MHz, but no matter what we did with voltage or latency, windows would BSOD while attempting to boot up. Either way, a couple hundred more MHz gives us gigabytes of bandwidth and a notable drop in overall latency. Final Thoughts & Conclusion Lexar’s first official jump into the gaming corner of the desktop world appears to be a complete success. Aesthetically, the sleek black exterior should blend well with most builds and thankfully, Lexar didn’t go crazy with branding and logos. The white logo on the sides isn’t bad at all and the light bar on top is clean and clear so you get to enjoy the fully RGB glory. Lexar’s RGB control software works well and includes everything you need in a single, clean interface. If you already have existing RGB software from your motherboard, you can use that instead so you don’t have extra programs running. From the performance standpoint, we can’t ask for much more. The Hades RGB kit performed admirably and lead similar speed kits in almost every test. Overclocking faired about average. We got an extra 200MHz effective out of the kit, which is about typical. We’ve had kids do more, and plenty do less. Most people don’t bother with this anyway, but there might be some extra performance left on the table if you choose to go after it. Otherwise, plug it in and enjoy! Great job Lexar!

Lexar Hades RGB DDR4 Review

Powerful. Colorful. Optimal.

A Closer Look

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A Closer Look

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