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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

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.