Not that long ago we took a look at the Silicon Power DDR4 2400 Gaming series and walked away moderately impressed with this newcomer to the DDR4 area. While it did provide ease of use, decent looks, and pretty decent (for its class) performance the largest problem we had with the Silicon Power Gaming series was the fact that it was… well… slow. It still offered pretty good value, but its factory stock settings of DDR4-2400 frequencies at CAS Latency of 17 is pretty conservative by modern standards – considering that DDR4-3000 and faster is very common place these days. Obviously, Silicon Power’s engineers agreed and recently they released two new series. The first is the XPower AirCool which is meant more for system builders who care more about budget performance that aesthetics and does not come clad in a metal heat spreader. The other is the XPower Turbine DDR4 series which will be looking closely at today. Specifically, the middle of the road (for this series) DDR4-3200 (2x8GB)16GB kit, which will come in at about the $150 (USD) price range.
With this new XPower line, Silicon Power has gone back to the drawing board and started with a completely fresh slate. Gone is the standard PCB, gone are the mediocre frequencies and timings. Gone is even the rather decent first-generation heat spreader. In their stead the Silicon Power engineers created an entirely new DDR4 series that starts with a custom ten layer PCB, uses much higher performance Samsung B-Die DDR4 RAM ICs, and is cooled by an entirely new heat spreader that just plain looks cool. Equally impressive is the new Turbine series covers nearly the entirety of the DDR4 spectrum with slow (but rather inexpensive) DDR4-2666 kits, all the way up to a blazingly fast DDR4-4133. To put that a different way, there is a Turbine series offering for nearly any build – all the way from mild to wild. Also nice to see, is the new Turbine series is offered in single and dual channel kits that range from 8GB all the way to 32GB, and all come at reasonable price tags – for their class that is… as its going to be a looong time before DDR4-4133 kits will be considered anything other than bloody expensive.
For most buyers these days the ‘sweet spot’ between price and performance resides somewhere between DDR4-2800 and DDR4-3400 – depending on a given builds requirements. We opted for the DDR4-3200 kit in particular as, while it certainly may not be the fastest, it does offer an interesting blend of performance, value, and overclocking potential. Equally important is DDR4-3200 will pretty much work right out of the box on nearly any AMD or Intel system.
With its dramatically improved performance, intriguing good looks, and decent price tag the Silicon Power DDR4 XPOWER Turbine series may just quickly become a cult classic… or not. Let’s put it under the microscope and see how it all shakes out.
