Apacer Blade Fire DDR4 3200MHz 32GB Memory Kit Review

Test System and Procedure

Usually, we employ the follow test system to find the maximum performance of various memory kits and allow large capacity modules to the reap the benefits of quad channel bandwidth.

Test System (Intel X99 DDR4)

• Motherboard – Asus Rampage V Extreme X99
• Processor – Intel Core i7 5960X at Stock With Turbo Enabled
• RAM – Varies By Review
• Graphics Card – Gigabyte G1 Gaming GTX 980Ti
• CPU Cooler – Thermaltake Water 3.0 AIO unit with Gelid GC-Extreme thermal paste
• Power Supply – Be Quiet Power Zone 1000W
• Main Storage Drive – Crucial MX100 256GB SSD over SATA III interface
• Chassis – Lian Li T80 Test Bench
• Operating System – Windows 8.1 64 Bit

Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t get the memory kit to boot on five X99 motherboards from different manufacturers. This is slightly worrying and brings into question the modules’ widespread compatibility. However, it might simply be down to bad luck and some sort of defect on the sample I received. As a result, I decided to run the benchmarks on the ASRock Z170 Extreme 7+ at stock values. Thankfully, this change allowed the memory to post without any hiccups and loaded Windows using the default XMP 2.0 profile.

Software Used

• SiSoft Sandra Tech Support Engineer
• AIDA 64 Engineer
• 3DMark
• WPrime
• CPU-Z

Methodology

In our RAM reviews, we keep things relatively simple. We put the RAM kit that is being tested into our test system and we benchmark it at its primary XMP profile using a variety of benchmarks and tests. Once complete we then overclock the kit to see how far we can push it in raw frequency terms, then benchmark it again using the same combination of tests with a CPU-Z validation of the overclock.

• Cinebench R15 Multithreaded Test
• AIDA64 Engineer Edition Memory Bandwidth and Latency Test
• SiSoft Sandra Tech Support (Engineer) Memory Bandwidth Test
• WPrime 32M Calculation Test
• 3DMark Fire Strike Physics Test