Silicon Power DDR4-2400 Review

Let us start by saying this kit is not perfect. Silicon Power did make a few rather glaring missteps when they decided to enter the DDR4 mainstream market. The first and most noticeable is not offering DDR4-2666, 2800 or 3000 speeds. AMD and Intel’s latest and greatest really do need more than DDR4-2400 performance levels to perform optimally. Silicon Power really, really needs to take the time and put in the effort of further binning the RAM ICs they get from SK Hynix. We don’t expect DDR4-3333 or DDR4-3600 kits, but these days for the mainstream consumer DDR4-2400 is too slow for those looking for a plug and play solution. Next is the timings. CL 17 at such a low speed is rather loose by modern standard. CL15 or CL16 would have been much more optimal. This too goes back to a lack of factory testing and binning.

Does all this add up to a failure? No. It simple means that this kit is not going to be right for everyone. This kit is however going to be a great fit for buyers who do not mind doing a bit of manual overclocking – but still want 100 percent plug and play reliability at DDR-2400 speeds. With not much effort the ‘factory baseline’ is just a mere suggestion and both tighter timings and much higher speeds are not only possible… but rather easy to accomplish. This should come as no surprise as the DDR4 Gaming DDR4-2400 kit we tested uses SK Hynix RAM chips. While not Samsung b-dies, those chips are used in a lot of kits by more firmly established RAM ‘manufactures’.

Lastly the combination of black, silver, and red accents makes this kit a good fit for a wide range of motherboards. Everything from silver heatsink clad ‘boards, to red PCB motherboards, to even black PCB motherboards… the DDR4 Gaming series will fit right in like it was designed just for that motherboard.
When you combine good, but not great, overlocking potential with good aesthetics and then mix in a fairly reasonable asking price the end result is almost sure to please.

Quite honestly for their first ‘serious’ DDR4 mainstream offerings Silicon Power got a lot more right than they got wrong. Yes there is plenty of room for future improvements but with only a few minor tweaks to their existing process and procedures, Silicon Power may just be the next G.Skill. We look forward to seeing what they do for an encore as that will be test of whether or not they are flexible enough to learn for their previous models and distill that hard-gained knowledge into actually better models. In the meantime, we certainly would have no problems running this kit of RAM (at overclocked memory frequencies) in any of our own systems. Its looks, performance, and usability are more than adequate for any number of scenarios that we envision ourselves requiring new RAM to fulfill.