G.Skill Ares 8GB 2400MHz Dual Channel Memory Kit Review

Introduction

Choosing the right memory kit for your system is a fairly mundane task, for most people it is just about getting the right amount of memory and at a good price. While price and capacity are important increasing attention has been paid to the frequency and aesthetics of memory kit designs in recent years. The frequency jump for DDR3 has reached its conclusion now that DDR4 is upon us and you could almost say that 1866MHz is the new mainstream speed while 2400MHz is no longer as “premium” as it used to be. Simply put high frequency DDR3 kits (2133 and upwards) have become very affordable to most consumers. We’ve also seen picky aesthetic characteristics like black PCBs and nicely designed heatspreaders become mainstreamed, great for system builders who like to keeps things tidy and colour-matched. Today we are looking at a memory kit which epitomizes the convergence of those two trends: the G.Skill Ares 8GB 2400MHz kit.

Offering 2400MHz at 1.65 volts with CL11 latencies this G.Skill kit is well suited for many current platforms like Intel’s LGA 1150 Haswell or AMD’s FM2+ Kaveri, particularly AMD’s FM2+ APU platform where faster memory means better integrated graphics performance. G.Skill are marketing this memory kit for Z97 users though and with the blue and black colour scheme this certainly makes sense: MSI and ASRock offer a number of blue and black motherboards such as the MSI Z97S SLI PLUS and the ASRock Z97 Extreme6. In true G.Skill fashion these memory kits also have the benefit of a lifetime warranty and competitive pricing so let’s take a closer look at the G.Skill Ares 8GB 2400MHz dual channel memory kit in this review.

Specifications

Packaging and Accessories

Packaging for memory kits is never very exciting but at least G.Skill have been smart and made their packaging super easy to open. The front points out the orientation of this product: towards Intel Z97 platforms.

A Closer Look

The G.Skill ARES kit looks clean and the black PCB helps keep things tidy. I also like that the modules are “normal” height, e.g. they are the height of the PCB. I could call these “low profile” like some other vendors do but that would be misleading when you can get lower profile RAM modules such as Crucial’s Ballistix Sport. It’s a little sad that the warranty sticker covers up the design and cannot be removed without voiding the warranty but I guess it is what it is.