Kingston Releases ‘Plug and Play’ HyperX Memory

For enthusiasts, picking up a super-fast kit of RAM and tweaking it to its correct values in the BIOS may seem like no big deal, but to the regular user, the mere thought of it could be overwhelming. But, to take advantage of those fast speeds, it’s sometimes required, and the reason simply has to do with the fact that memory is shipped with different setting profiles, and for the sake of a safe boot, the guaranteed-to-work profile is used.

What that means is that while your memory kit is specced for DDR3-2133 speeds with tight 9-9-9 timings, due to the safeguards in place, if nothing is tweaked in the BIOS the kit will instead boot up with a safe configuration, such as DDR3-1333 8-8-8. The fix, of course, is to go into the BIOS and adjust the settings manually, and I admit… it irks me to picture the number of people out there who deliberately bought a faster kit only to inadvertently run it at much slower speeds.

To help get around this issue, Kingston has released “Plug and Play” HyperX modules – memory that boots up in a PC with the same specs quoted on its sticker. How could memory modules be considered “plug and play”, you ask? It’s rather simple, but creative. Instead of giving the modules a super-safe profile like mentioned above, the first profile on these modules is the performance profile.

It might seem unwise of Kingston to make a move like this given that the reason for safe profiles exist is to ensure a proper boot, even if the PC can’t handle the high frequencies or timings, but the beauty of these modules is that they are guaranteed to work across all Sandy Bridge platforms, desktops and mobiles alike. Part of Kingston’s ability to pull this off is thanks to Sandy Bridge’s excellent ability to scale memory, and at the end of the day, DDR3-1600 9-9-9 simply has no risk of being unbootable.

You might have noticed that i mentioned DDR3-1600 9-9-9. which for all intents and purposes, isn’t a major setting, but that’s to be expected. Kingston could only go so high before wanting to risk going further. I am a bit surprised that the modules are not at least 8-8-8, but we’ll see if time improves that.

Fountain Valley, CA — April 25, 2011 — Kingston Technology Company, Inc., the independent world leader in memory products, today announced the new HyperX® Plug and Play (PnP) series of high-performance enthusiast memory. HyperX PnP are the first modules to scale the higher memory heights that are a part of the second generation Intel® Core™ i5 and i7 CPUs. The memory is programmed with faster frequencies and when ‘plugged’ into a system using the Sandy Bridge chipset, will automatically ‘play’ at either 1600MHz or 1866MHz in both desktop and notebook PCs.