Gskill TridentZ DDR4-3400 16GB Kit

F4-3400C16D-16GTZ - Introduction Gskill TridentZ DDR4-3400 16GB Kit With the supply of older Z97 motherboards and Intel LGA-1150 socket CPU’s all but gone – and AMD still relegated to the more entry level corners of the marketplace – DDR4 RAM is certainly here to stay. While this certainly will greatly annoy consumers who have a big enough stockpile of DDR3 sticks to make a little mountain out of the now useless RAM, the upside is that DDR4 prices are finally starting to become much, much more tolerable. In fact, 16GB of DDR4 will now only set consumers back slightly more than DDR3 would and yet offer noticeably higher performance, and overclocking abilities. One manufacturer known for creating RAM kits that are both reasonably priced and high performance is G. Skill. G. Skill became a veritable household name amongst enthusiasts in the DDR3 days, and based on their offerings so far they plan to not only continue this highly laudable tradition but actually improve upon it in their latest DDR4 models. The reason G. Skill became so wildly popular is whether it is their lower profile RipJaws or high profile Trident series, consumers can rely upon G. Skill to push both the performance and value envelopes in each and every model they offer. Equally impressive is G. Skill are also known for making RAM kits that are not only perfectly stable but are also extremely attractive – making them perfect for custom system builders and enthusiasts alike. [video id="ka4rJsFIbiE" site="youtube" [/video Their latest addition to the Trident series is the ‘TridentZ’, and much like where the DDR3 Trident X series left off, the Trident Z series is easily some of the most attractive sets of DDR4 RAM kits available today. While looks is certainly a nice bonus, with kits ranging in size from 16 to 64, and speeds from DDR4-300 to DDR4-4133, the Trident Z is quickly gaining a reputation amongst knowledgeable consumers as being even more impressive than its predecessor. Today we will be placing a 2x8GB (16GB) Trident Z DDR4-3400 kit under the microscope (aka F4-3400C16D-16GTZ) and will be seeing how much of this reputation is fact and how much (if any) is based more upon wishful thinking. This DDR4 CL16 kit is very interesting as it is more towards the base end of the TridentZ lineup on shear capacity, but on the performance side is more towards the top of the heap. This is a combination that many performance orientated consumers opt for as it satisfies most of their need for speed, as well as their capacity needs. As such its asking price of $110 not only makes it very reasonable but actually is better than most offerings from Kingston, Crucial, Corsair and others. Put another way this blend of performance and value is pretty much a siren call for experienced consumers in desperate need of some new RAM. Needless to say it will be interesting to see what makes this kit unique and how G. Skill were able to do what few other manufactures could do: offer high performance kit without the high price tag. F4-3400C16D-16GTZ - Specifications and Features F4-3400C16D-16GTZ - Closer Look Compared to say Crucial, the shipping container which the Trident Z 16GB DDR4-3400 comes in is much more bold and brash in its appearance. While yes it still is ‘just’ a cardboard box the outside not only shows off the two-tone nature of the new Trident Z, it boldly proclaims that the Trident Z series offers ‘Performance for the Truly Extreme’. That certainly is a rather big claim to make but considering the F4-3400C16D-16GTZ kit offers DDR4-3400 levels of performance and it is not even close to being the fastest offering, G. Skill does have the abilities to back that claim up. Opening the box, we can see that the Trident Z uses a standard two piece clear plastic internal container that keeps the RAM secure while in transit. This is fairly typical as it is as practical as it is frugal – i.e. it does not needless add to the weight of shipping the ram across the country (or continent) and yet offers good levels of protection. Moving on to the RAM itself a few things do pop out. First and foremost is these are downright gorgeous looking DDR4-RAM modules. G. Skill’s Trident series has always been the more aesthetically pleasing model from G. Skill but this generation they knocked it out of the veritable park. This is because unlike nearly any other DDR4 kit available G. Skill has opted for a two tone look with one side of each stick covered in a brushed stainless steel heatsink and the other in a black heatsink! Equally attractive is G. Skill has included a top red insert that contrasts nicely with both sides. More importantly this combination allows the Trident Z series to compliment a wide variety of color schemes – everything from black, to gray, to red system build color schemes will ‘work’ with this model. The next is these heatsinks are not only attractive looking but are extremely robust. Terms like ‘beefy’ do spring to mind when picking them up as each stick weighs in at nearly two and half ounces . With most of this additional weight coming from the heatsinks themselves. Though some of this weight also stems from the fact that G.Skill uses a ten layer PCB design for the Trident Z. Now that is overkill, and perfectly fine by us. As a nice little bonus the speed of the RAM itself is embossed directly on to the end of the PCB and this will make sorting out which sticks are which in a parts pile eons easier than usual. In the either case, as most of this additional weight comes from the heatsinks this means that even when heavily overclocked the internal DDR4 RAM modules will not overheat. The downside to this is that the Trident Z series is moderately tall. To be specific they stand 44mm high, which is slightly more than their RipJaws V compatriots (42mm). This additional height may cause issues with some CPU cooling solutions, but most should be OK with it. By the same token compared to say Corsair’s LPX series they are downright massive so check your CPU coolers dimensions before making a final decision on which RAM kit to buy. The next thing which stands out is if you pay careful attention to the numbers below the bar code you will see ‘A500’ mixed in. This means that the uber-high performance Samsung ICs are what G. Skill are using for their Trident Z series, and this is some of the highest performance DDR4 ICs that can be easily sourced these days. Put another way this is a great foundation upon which to create an ultra-high performance DDR4 RAM kit. Though it does also explain why this kit needs 1.35v – as the Samsung ICs need the additional voltage in order to reach these lofty heights. Also impressive is this kit is rated for DDR4-3400 speeds and at a fairly fast 16-18-18-38 timings. On this end of things there are couple points that we do need to go over. First and foremost, G. Skill has only included one XMP profile and in order to hit the ‘oddball’ 3400 number your system’s BCLK really will need to be doing 102.11Mhz instead of more typical 100. This is because the XMP profile will try and use a 1:25 divider and 133:100 ratio…. which at 100BCLK will result in about 3333MHz. Since Z170 systems allow for insane BCLK levels this is not that big a deal, but if your system of choice is not a Z170 based system this may cause an occasional hiccup. G. Skill really should have taken the time to include a second XMP profile for DDR4-3333 for compatibilities sake. This is not that big a deal as 99 times out of 100 instead of causing instability issues all that will happen is the Trident Z ‘DDR4-3400’ kit will run at DDR4-3333(ish), but a secondary XMP profile to fall back on would have reduced this potential issue. On the positive side as this is a Samsung based set of RAM in all likelihood enthusiasts may even get higher performance out of this kit than what they paid for – which is a nice bonus. F4-3400C16D-16GTZ - Testing Methodology The reasons to purchase a high performance RAM kit are as varied as the consumers who purchase them. For some application load time is the deciding factor in their purchasing decision. For others it is Virtualized Operating System performance. For others still it is game load times. For others still it is to shave a .1 of second off their synthetic test scores so as to climb ever higher in the online rankings that various sites host. With such a wide variety of criteria it behooves us to use as wide and varied a list of testing protocols as possible. As such we have used a blend of synthetic and real world benchmarks, as well as custom real world game benchmarking. For real world and video games we have used the same tests as we use for storage testing and created a RAMDrive. Specifically, we have used Borderlands, GTA V, and Saints Row 3. For synthetic tests we used Cinebench, FAHBench, SuperPi, and AIDA tests. For real world tests we used Adobe PhotoShop and VMWare. The OS was a fresh clean install of Windows 7 with all latest hotfixes, patches and updates applied. To show the performance differences we have tested at stock, ‘XMP’, and then manual overclocking levels. All tests were run 4 times and average results are represented. Main Test System Processor : Intel i7 5930K or Intel i7 6700K Memory : Test Kit Video Card : MSI 980Ti Lightning Motherboard : Asus Sabertooth X99 & Asus Z170 Deluxe Cooling : Noctua U12S SSD : 1x Intel 750 1.2TB NVMe SSD Power Supply : Corsair AX860i Monitor : Dell U2714H OS : Windows 7 Ultimate x64 SP1 F4-3400C16D-16GTZ - Overclocking After working with these sticks for over sixty hours of testing one thing became rather clear: G. Skill has tightly binned their Samsung RAM IC’s. This is both a good thing and a bad and it really will come down to what you as an enthusiast are interested in: ease of use or getting enjoyment from finding the actual limits of your new tech purchase. Basically, on the one hand there is very little ‘chip lottery’ evolved with overclocking them so the chances of getting a golden set of sticks that allows for massive overclocking potential is all but impossible. On the other these kits do come heavily factory overclocked and can be counted on to be 100% stable at their factory overclock. In other words, when opting for this kit you are paying a small premium for G. Skill to have done most of the hard work for you, but if you really think DDR4-3400 is not enough speed of you…. well you are better off looking at the higher binned versions. We say this as G. Skill has (probably) already found all the golden Samsung ICs in a given batch… and used them in the official DDR4-4100 kits. To be honest we doubt many consumers will be unhappy with hitting DDR4-3400 speeds – as this is extremely fast. So fast that outside of some very niche areas we doubt many would tell the difference between this kit and the much more expensive DDR4-4000 option. Now with all that said, there is going to be some room left for improvement and this will vary from sample to sample. In our particular case we found the highest rock solid, ultra-stable overclock to be DDR4-3600. More importantly we did not need to feed additional voltage to get it (1.35v was enough) and in fact pushing more voltage did absolutely no good… unless we were willing to hit 1.45v. If we were fine with this level of voltage, we could have pushed them to the DDR4-3700 range. However even then we would have had to loosen the timings up significantly to make them fully stable. With so little extra speed gained from pushing more voltage than we are comfortable with, and also using downright sloppy timings, we feel that DDR4-3600 is about the best you can expect from this kit. Once again you will either really like the fact that this kit is darn near ‘plug and play’ with all the ‘hard work’ done for you, or you will dislike the fact that this amount of untapped performance is so minor. Then again this is a ‘free’ upgrade and really will not take all that much effort to do! With that being said before anyone changes their mind on the Trident Z DDR4-3600 kit and purchases this cheaper kit instead, a few things have to be pointed out. First and foremost, in order to hit DDR4-3600 we did have to loosen the timings a smidge. Specifically, instead of 16-18-18-38-2T, we had to drop back to CAS Latency of 17 and use 17-18-18-38-2T. This many not seem like that big a deal, and really is not, but 17-18-18-38-2T is slower than the official Trident Z DDR4-3600’s CL16 speed. Furthermore, the DDR4-3600 kit is not only CL16 but is actually faster at 3600 than this kit is at 3400, with timings of 17-18-18-3 6 -2T. In other words, there is very little room to manually overclock, and to be honest we are fine with that. This kit is fast, stable and gorgeous enough that not having all that much gas left in the tank is not that big a deal. You may disagree with this, and as such may wish to think long and hard about the faster options available. F4-3400C16D-16GTZ - Benchmarks AIDA64 Benchmark AIDA64 Extreme Edition is a diagnostic and benchmarking software suite for home users that provides a wide range of features to assist in overclocking, hardware error diagnosis, stress testing, and sensor monitoring. It has unique capabilities to assess the performance of the processor, system memory, and disk drives. The benchmarks used in this review are the memory bandwidth and latency benchmarks. Memory bandwidth benchmarks (Memory Read, Memory Write, Memory Copy) measure the maximum achievable memory data transfer bandwidth. The code behind these benchmark methods are written in Assembly and they are extremely optimized for every popular AMD, Intel and VIA processor core variants by utilizing the appropriate x86/x64, x87, MMX, MMX+, 3DNow!, SSE, SSE2, SSE4.1, AVX, and AVX2 instruction set extension. The Memory Latency benchmark measures the typical delay when the CPU reads data from system memory. Memory latency time means the penalty measured from the issuing of the read command until the data arrives to the integer registers of the CPU. SuperPI Benchmark SuperPi calculates the number of digits of PI in a pure 2D benchmark. For the purposes of this review, calculation to 32 million places will be used. RAM speed, RAM timings, CPU speed, L2 cache, and Operating System tweaks all effect the speed of the calculation, and this has been one of the most popular benchmarks among enthusiasts for several years. SuperPi was originally written by Yasumasa Kanada in 1995 and was updated later by snq to support millisecond timing, cheat protection and checksum. The version used in these benchmarks, 1.5 is the official version supported by hwbot. As you can see this factory overclocked RAM kit is darn impressive. By simply enabling the XMP profile consumers can get much greater performance from their system. That us makes the extra expense well worth it. FAHBench 1.2.0 With Folding@home becoming more popular, and since folding performance is a fairly memory intensive endeavor this makes it a great option for showing how performance is impacted by RAM performance. The official FAHBench includes numerous options but we have opted to use the OpenCL CPU option and test first with implicit modeling and then explicit. WinRAR x64 WinRAR is by far one of the most popular compression and archival utilities commercially available today. As it memory intensive it is also extremely useful in evaluating the overall performance of the RAM sample. For repeatability we have opted for the built-in benchmark processing 1,000MB of data. CineBench R15 CINEBENCH is a real-world cross platform test suite that evaluates your computer's performance capabilities. CINEBENCH is based on MAXON's award-winning animation software CINEMA 4D, which is used extensively by studios and production houses worldwide for 3D content creation. In this system benchmark section, we will use the x64 Main Processor Performance (CPU) test scenario. The Main Processor Performance (CPU) test scenario uses all of the system's processing power to render a photorealistic 3D scene (from the viral "No Keyframes" animation by AixSponza). This scene makes use of various algorithms to stress all available processor cores. The test scene contains approximately 2,000 objects which in turn contain more than 300,000 polygons in total, and uses sharp and blurred reflections, area lights, shadows, procedural shaders, antialiasing, and much more. The result is displayed in points (pts). The higher the number, the faster your processor. Once again this kit is darn fast with its XMP profile enabled. So much so that some consumers may not even want to take the time to upgrade it to DDR4-3600 speeds. When you think about it, that is very impressive and just highlights how fast this Trident Z kit really is. Brilliant stuff! F4-3400C16D-16GTZ - Loading Time Tests ADOBE CS6 LOAD TIME Photoshop is a notoriously slow loading program under the best of circumstances, and while the latest version is actually pretty decent, when you add in a bunch of extra brushes and the such you get a really great torture test which can bring even the best of the best to their knees. Let’s see how our review unit faired in the Adobe crucible! VMWare Load Time Performance VMWare is a powerful application which allows users the ability to run a virtualized Operating System from inside their main OS. This program is not only processor and RAM intensive but puts significant load on the storage subsystem with deep, heavy read/write IO requests to the drive. To help give you a general idea on the performance improvements from running a RAM Drive we have timed the time it takes to load Microsoft Window’s XP SP3 from inside VMWare. This is another area where RAM speed really is important – as it will have a direct impact on the overall performance of your system. Is the impact large? That depends on your definition ‘large’… and how patient you are waiting for an application to load. We personally hate wasting time so for us RAM speed is very important. You may feel differently. But at this price point we doubt many will quibble over the minor increase in cost compared to slower options! Boarderlands 2 Load time For Borderlands 2 we have recorded the time it takes to fast travel from Sanctuary map to Oasis. Oasis is the beginning of the Captain Scarlett and Her Pirate's Booty DLC. This was chosen as it not only is a special level not included in the original Borderlands 2 game, but also contains additional data which should slow the load of this special map even further. Saints Row 3 Load time For Saints Row 3 (labelled ‘SR3’ in the chart) we have recorded the load time from a specific save game. The game was saved just at the end of the ‘Shaundi saved’ version of “Three Way Ending” but before the cut scene. This was chosen as the game not only loads the Three Way Ending data but also the next level “Gangsta’s in Space” DLC level. F4-3400C16D-16GTZ - GTA V FPS Testing Unlike the two other game related benchmarks, this benchmark does not use load time as its metric. Instead it uses go old fashioned frames per second. This is because unlike the majority of games available today, Grand Theft Auto V (labeled ‘GTA V’ in the chart) actually is somewhat bandwidth limited. This makes it a very good game for showing how much impact the various RAM speed’s have on overall performance. For Grand Theft Auto V (labelled ‘GTA V’ in the chart) we have opted to use the games built in benchmark with max settings at 1080P resolution. As you can see the impact on overall performance is going to be moderate in modern games; but as with most things in life, the biggest and fastest RAM kit you can afford will (almost) always be the better choice. Just be aware that in order to actually get a RAM drive large enough to fit a game in you will have to purchase two of these kits as 16GB is a tad small. F F4-3400C16D-16GTZ - Score Card and Summary Performance: 38 out of 40. While not the absolute fastest kit available today (that honor goes to 4000+ kits) DDR4-3400 with overclocking abilities of DDR-3600 is still bloody fantastic. Basically this kit should easily satisfy 99.9% of the buying public’s need for speed. Ease of Use: 18 out of 20 As with most ultra-high performance DDR4 memory kits the G.Skill Trident Z DDR4-3400 kit is extremely easy to use; however as it is a 1.35v based set and not 1.20v the occasional misstep can happen from time to time. This further compounded by the fact that it will require a BCLK of 102.11 to hit its rated speed. While none of our motherboards had any issues, the occasional motherboard may not automatically give this kit enough voltage for the system to POST. At which point a 1.2v kit will be needed. This would be extremely rare, and par for the course for all 1.35v sets, but still can happen. The same holds true of the BCLK potential issue as most likely all that will happen is it will run at DDR4-3333 speeds instead. Just be aware of this if you are purchasing it for non-Z170 based system. Build Quality & Warranty: 18 out of 20 With its unique combination of killer good looks, down right beefy heatsinks, and a lifetime warranty there really is not much to be disappointed with G.Skill’s Trident Z series. The only minor quibble is that they are 44mm high (vs 31.25mm for std DDR4 modules) and may interfere with mounting process of the occasional air based CPU cooling solution. That really is not that big of a problem and just shows how good these kits have been designed. Value: 17 out of 20 This set of DDR4 ram is priced very reasonably for its class, and offers a lot of performance for its asking price. Mix in a lifetime warranty and the value is pretty darn decent. Final Score: 91 out of 100 With its killer good looks, extremely robust heatsinks, excellent out of the box performance, and even good overclocking abilities the G. Skill TridentZ DDR4-3400 16GB kit is darn impressive. This really is a case of the reality living up to… and maybe even surpassing, the hype surrounding a new product release. Bravo G. Skill! F4-3400C16D-16GTZ - Closing Statement Obviously the TridentZ DDR4-3400 16GB kit is not going to be right for all consumers and all scenarios. First and foremost, is 16GB is a tad too small if consumers are interested in a RAM drive and making game load times a thing of the past. Next is this kit really is meant for Z170 systems as two sticks will not cut it on a 2011-v3 / X99 based rig. Equally important is that 16GB is a touch small for PC gaming enthusiasts and while the number of games which need more than 16GB can be counted on one hand, the number of games which can gain a noticeable boost from going into the DDR4-3400 range are equally small. Considering some ‘slower’ 32GB kits can be found for nearly what this 16GB kit can cost, some consumers may want to think long and hard if this combination of blazing speed but only moderate capacity is the right one for their needs. Now with that taken care of, for actual enthusiasts this kit from G.Skill is bloody fantastic. $110 for 16 Gigabytes worth of perfectly stable, extremely high performing ram is a bargain. This is because for every scenario that favors capacity over speed, there are nearly as many that favor speed over capacity. Thanks to Intel Skylake’s fantastic memory controller, and fantastic RAM overclocking options, opting for even DDR4-2666 will actually bottleneck some major applications – and not just synthetic programs either. For example, real world programs like PhotoShop or the various video encoding programs, all demand as fast a memory buffer as you can afford to provide it with. For consumers who do in fact have a need for speed the additional few dollars for this kit over a DDR4-2666 kit is money well spent. The very fact that you can easily push these to DDR4-3600 performance levels just makes this deal all the much sweeter. If all that was not enough the fact that this kit can offer all this and look great while doing it really does solidify our opinion of the Trident Z DDR4-3400 kit. To be blunt this kit can easily take an already good looking system build and make it look better . For these reasons, we have zero issue in recommending the new Trident Z series in general, and for enthusiast have very little qualms about doing it with this particular kit. Its fast, its good looking, and it is perfectly stable even when overclocked. What more could anyone ask for‽

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