G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) 240-Pin PC RAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model F3-1600C9D-16GXM

Pros: – Fast and stable.
– Enabling XMP in BIOS clocks to 1600Mhz speed and adjusts timings accordingly.
– If XMP is not an option (and your board is running this kit at 1333Mhz) entering the timings manually literally takes all of a minute.
– Noticeable performance increase in several memory hungry applications. (If you’re a video/graphics editor, you’ll wish you’d ordered sooner!)
– Room to overclock if this wasn’t fast enough!
– I hate leaving ‘non-technical’ pros, but this kit does look pretty cool. Not only in design but their choice of blue really pops off the motherboard.

Cons: – This is not a con of the memory, but if you’re using Windows 7 Home Premium or Windows Vista Home Premium PAY ATTENTION HERE!
Micrsoft has set a limitation of 16GB to the maximum available memory supported in these versions. While this kit will work, Windows will report 32GB installed with 16GB available.
You have 2 choices here:
1. Buy a 16GB kit instead and save a little $$$
2. Upgrade to the Professional or Ultimate versions. As of 03/2013 the Anytime Upgrade option for Home Premium to Professional for Windows 7 is ~$90.
– Not all motherboards will run this memory at 1600Mhz out of the box. If you need assistance in manually setting the timings, check the the G.Skill forums.

Overall Review: I’ll try and keep this review short and to the point.
At the risk of sounding like a fan, which is not my intent, this is my 4th memory kit from G.Skill. 4 kits over 7 years with 0 problems. There are very few vendors who put out competitively priced memory that consistently receive high ratings from their customers.
Look at the reviews for yourself. Not only do they respond to customers who are dissatisfied or having problems (And note they don’t respond with the same generic “we’re sorry… contact support” company standard copy/paste used by most other vendors.), but they also respond to the positive reviews as well. They take the time to communicate with each individual customer.
The reason I say this is so you understand you really can’t go wrong with this kit vs any others you may be considering right now and I’m very confident in that statement.

With that said, 32GB might be a little more then I personally need today and perhaps a few of you as well. But it’s nice to know a year or two or five from now that a memory upgrade won’t be on my/your list of concerns.

Pros: Very fast RAM.

Cons: I run sys_basher periodically to determine if my RAM is reliable. Desktop systems don’t have ECC so there is no way to know if you have a RAM problem unless you run a diagnostic like sys_basher (availble in the repos for Fedora and Enterprise Linux 6 and 7). I bought this RAM in May, it passed sys_basher at that time. Over New Years I ran sys_basher on all of my systems (I have 10). One of these DIMMs failed badly. I ran sys_basher repeatedly (it’s an overnight run) and if failed consistantly. I moved the DIMM to another socket just to make sure it wasn’t a motherboard problem, the errors moved with the DIMM. I replaced the DIMM with a spare, now the system passes sys_basher.

Overall Review: DRAM is not nearly as reliable as people think. I’ve had several DIMMs fail on me, altough none has failed as badly as this DIMM. Unforunately desktop systems have no error detection or correction, if you want that you have to buy a server, so the only way to know if you have a problem is to run a diagnostic. On Linux systems the program to use is sys_basher, I don’t think there is anything as good on Windows boxes (Memtest86 isn’t nearly as comprehensive).

Pros: Installed this to replace slower 1333 memory and it jumped my index rating to 7.7 so very satisfied with it recognized by bios but like so many not set to proper speed had to manually set the speed, it is a shame that mobo manufactures can’t setup to auto adjust the speed

Cons: have to manually set speed in bios on my mobo

Overall Review: System
ASUS Sabertooth 990FX
AMD FX-4100
GSKILL Ripjaws 16GB 2x8GB
Cooler Master Storm Enforcer
Antec 550W PSU
Lite-on Blu-ray Burner
Sony Optiarc DVD Burner
Koutech USB 3 card reader
EVGA GeForce GTX 460 (Fermi) 1GB 256-bit
Acer 23″ monitor (Stacked Bottom)
Asus 23″ monitor (Stacked Top)
Crucial M4 128GB SSD (OS)
Western Digital Blue 500GB SATA II HDD (Data Drive)
Windows 7 Professional 64bit

Pros: After I RMAed the ram Gskill had it shipped back to me from California to Ohio in 4 days. The ram they sent back to me works perfectly. Thanks Gskill! I now remember why I have been a customer of yours since 2004. Your customer service is EXCELLENT! You even sent back the new ram with my son’s brand new shirt I used as packing material lol

Cons: NONE

Pros: Near the top, if not at the top of the ratings at Passmark for like speed/capacity ram.
Price. At the time of my purchase I was able to get two sticks for under $130.

Cons: I guess this is a con, ‘selling single sticks of RAM’.
It seems that if you don’t spell it out for everybody that two sticks are needed in a dual channel mobo, they’ll just blame their ignorance on the mfgr. or NewEgg, …ridiculous.

Overall Review: Why are people blaming shipping on G.Skill?
These reviews are for the PRODUCT, not the transaction.
Why are people blaming G.Skill because ‘they’ didn’t know dual channel meant needing two sticks?
When the price point is right on this memory, ie. sale, Shell Shocker etc., you’re going to be getting high quality ram for your money.
I don’t normally write reviews, but G.Skill has gotten a raw deal on some prior reviews.

Pros: No problem with Asus P8Z77-V Pro. Worked without BIOS update and after BIOS update to v1206.

While not listed on the QVL for mobo, the GSkill forum admin recommended to several requests for the P8Z77-Pro, so I bought with confidence.

Cons: Bit pricey, but not a lot of options for 32gb kits for mobo.

Shoddy packaging by Newegg

Overall Review: Haven’t pushed these. Don’t intend to overclock – don’t need to, anyway. Everything runs fine at stock / default settings.

What to do with 32gb? Oh, right, Photoshop while encoding video…and not think about adding RAM ever again with this build.

I’m rating the product, not Newegg’s shipping. If I gave that a separate rating, I’d give it zero eggs. Newegg shipped in a standard padded manila envelope with no other padding (unless you count the packing slip). The plastic packaging the memory came in was actually cracked about an inch into the packaging (though the manila envelope was not ripped, making me suspect that this damage to the packaging happened pre-shippig).

My notes to Newegg about the poor packaging was responded to, but with equally poor grammar. (That does’t instill a lot of confidence.) I’m considering myself lucky that the memory works fine. I haven’t run memtest on them, but so far, so good at stock settings.

Pros: Speed, price.

Cons: None.

Overall Review: My ASUS Z97-A marks these sticks as being 1333 MHz instead of 1600, so I had to go into my BIOS and set the RAM frequency from Auto to 1600.

Pros: Settings are 9-9-9-24-40.
I could probably get 8-9-9-22-21-31 but I am not going to bother for now.
Actual size: 16,384MBytes

I am considering a 10G ramdisk but everything runs so fast already that I will put it off for now.

Cons: none

Overall Review: The MOTHERBOARD won’t automatically put this at 1600, but that is because 1600 is considered overclocked per DDR3 standards. So to get the rated 1600, you have to go into the bios and manually over clock it. If this is too hard for you, go buy an Apple.

BEWARE: Windows 7 will not let you go above 16G without upgrading to professional version.