Our Choice

Low-power hardware is definitely more popular in Europe than in North America, as average energy costs are lower in the U.S., causing the average European to be more fastidious about power consumption.
With that said, there’s one aspects to low power products: the environment and the cost of your energy bill. The environment may benefit from decreased hardware power consumption. They emphasize only the likelihood of a benefit because the power and natural resources (including fresh-water) necessary to produce and recycle or dispose of a piece of hardware is usually ignored in the energy equation. All ought to be part of a bigger resources balance sheet, but commercial promotion only goes halfway. This is why they prefer not to stress the “green” factor much and limit our statements to power reduction.

Let’s look at power consumption. In this particular case, they decided to examine technique memory, a part that is usually overlooked because it doesn’t require plenty of power to operate compared to a processor or graphics card. Users and memory vendors usually focus on higher memory speeds, and few would justify reducing memory speeds in order to decrease power consumption. However, more advanced silicon often allows reductions in operating voltage. We’ve seen this in processors plenty of times, and Kingston has begun to apply this to memory.

The HyperX DDR3 LoVo-series caters to upper-mainstream DDR3 speeds, meaning DDR3-1333 and DDR3-1600, and the product offers the performance you expect at decreased voltage. But given that memory only requires a few watts of power anyway, they had reservations about the general gains obtainable. Does this have a noticeable impact on total technique power? And will these modules perform similarly to those walking at more standard voltages?

DDR3 Memory Overview

Most desktop-class systems obtainable today from AMD or Intel use DDR3 memory. This is the case for all systems based on AMD’s Socket AM3 and Intel’s LGA 1366 and LGA 1156 interfaces. The LGA 775-based platform can use either DDR2 or DDR3 memory.
Desktop DDR3 comes on 240-pin DIMMs while laptop DDR3 arrives on 204-pin SO-DIMMs. DDR2 desktop RAM has the same amount of pins (200 pins for DDR2 SO-DIMMs), but different notches to keep away from mixing them up, since they’re electrically incompatible.
DDR3 was specified by the JEDEC Solid State Expertise Association to run between 1.5 V and 1.575 V (a 30% drop from DDR2’s 1.8 V), and to resist voltages of up to 1.975 V before taking destroy. The prefetch buffer was doubled from DDR2’s two bits to seven bits, which is why the effective bandwidth doubled from between DDR2-400 and DDR2-800 to DDR3-800 to DDR3-1600. Double information rate (DDR) means that information is transferred in the coursework of the falling and the rising fringe of the clock signal. In a simple example, DDR3-1600 is based on double information rate, hence the physical memory I/O clock is 800 MHz.

Plenty of memory products on the market were designed for clock speeds beyond JEDEC’s specs. We have already seen DDR3-2400. However, such speeds require a significant voltage increase to maintain memory reliability. On the other hand, lower memory speeds may still be reliable at decreased voltage. Fanatics usually make their way through the BIOS-level parameter jungle, but regular users can still access one mechanisms for basic settings and technique tuning.

Viable memory settings are usually taken from a memory module’s Serial Presence Detect (SPD) ROM, where all memory products store their timing parameters. Each clock speed setting requires different parameters to operate, and motherboards usually utilize the SPD defaults unless you require to tweak your technique and overclock your memory along with other parts. Intel added extensions to the SPD that are called Extended Memory Profile (XMP). This addition seamlessly utilizes unallocated bytes on the EPROM. If memory is XMP-compliant, then it is feasible to have your motherboard and tweaking program use the most appropriate XMP profiles to accomplish your overclocking goals. But again, this can also optimize memory in the opposite direction to reduce power and decrease operating temperature.

LoVo-series kits consist of one 2 GB DDR3 modules for a total memory capacity of 4 GB. All LoVo products can walking common memory speeds at decreased voltage. There is a DDR3-1800 kit that can run at 1.35 V as against 1.5+ V (KHX1800C9D3LK2/4GX). Another kit runs DDR3-1333 at only 1.25 V, and a third product (the one they tested) can either do DDR3-1333 at 1.25 V or DDR3-1600 at 1.35 V. Finally, a limited-quantity premium version can do DDR3-1866 at 1.35 V or DDR3-1600 at 1.25 V. This sounds impressive, but knowing that the DDR3-1333 1.25 V kit is already $169 and DDR3-1800 at 1.35 V is $175, you can bet that the premium version is beyond $200.

All LoVo kits are specified to run at CL9-9-9-27 timings, which is a requirement for low-voltage operation (and loose, as far as timings go). More aggressive timing parameters usually require higher voltages. Then again, in case you require low power, you are usually willing to trade at least a tiny bit of performance. Fortunately, there is tiny to trade, since the effective difference between DDR3-1333 and DDR3-1600 is negligible. They did find some differences between 1.25 V and 1.35 V, but the results are more apparent in benchmarks than the actual world. In the finish, the memory voltage setting has no direct impact on performance, and DDR3-1600 will give you a slight advantage over DDR3-1333.

There’s more fascinating differences in power consumption, though, which brings up back to the LoVo series. Idle power decreases only by 0.5 W when going from 1.5 V to 1.35 V and by another 0.5 W when switching to 1.25 V. This is not much, but thinking about that the remainder of the technique remains unchanged, it is something. Peak power decreases from 178 W and 180 W at 1.5 V (DDR3-1333 and -1600 speeds) to 174 W and 177 W at 1.25 V and 1.35 V. While these numbers are definitely not relevant to desktop PCs, the measured power consumption differences can become important one times you start to power-optimize all other technique parts. At the finish of the day, a few watts difference on a low-power desktop PC like our 25 W Core i5 technique becomes relevant.

One times you optimize your technique with low-power primary parts (CPU, motherboard, drives, etc.), the only way to further decrease power consumption will be through tweaking and undervolting, which may cause reliability issues. As an alternative to this, Kingston’s HyperX DDR3 LoVo provides an additional step for further reducing technique power and temperature. It’s like life in general: getting closer to perfection comes at a cost.