When it comes to DDR4 RAM, the market has decided that 3200MT/s CL16 is the perfect spec: noticeably faster than early DDR4-2133, 2400 and 2666, while being significantly cheaper than higher-end 3400, 3600 and 4000 kits. Normally you’d expect to pay around £60 for a 16GB dual-channel kit of DDR4 RAM hitting this spec, but today you can get a Kingston Fury Beast 16GB kit for just £48.64 at CCL in the UK.
Looking online, this price is £5 (or more than 10%) cheaper than the current Amazon price, so this is a tidy little discount on a commodity that doesn’t often see big price drops.
I’d recommend this kit for anyone building a low to mid-range system, as the performance gains you get from faster RAM level out quite rapidly from here until you hit around DDR4-3600, then evaporate almost completely. As you’ll only see the benefit of faster RAM in CPU-limited scenarios, if you plan to game at 1440p or 4K, then this RAM is also fine even in high-end systems. RAM can also influence content creation workloads, but most of the common ones – 3D rendering, video transcoding – don’t really see a noticeable speedup from faster RAM, so again this DDR4-3200 is suitable for a wide range of systems.
This RAM is also quite short, with no RGB or excesssive designs adding to the height of the memory, so it’s suitable for use in systems where memory height is limited – eg small form factor builds, or builds that utilise a CPU tower cooler that overhangs the RAM slots.
In terms of more advanced information, this looks like single-rank RAM; I looked online for some time to find the memory manufacturer but can’t confirm whether it’s Samsung, SK Hynix, etc. Some manufacturers hide this info in the product code, but it looks like Kingston does not – so if anyone buys this, check out Thaiphoon Burner or something to see who makes the memory modules and let me know!
Will Judd
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