G.Skill Sniper X F4-3400C16D-16GSXW w/ Samsung B-Die

G.Skill offers its Sniper X range with a choice of three camouflage designs. Our 3400MHz kit came with an Urban Camo design that uses black, white and grey in the colour scheme. The 3600MHz kit we have has the same design which helped when it came to waving the RAM modules around during our video. The two other designs are Classic Camo (green and khaki) or Digital Camo (black and yellow) and we recall seeing them at Computex and thinking they looked appealing.

It is worth reiterating that none of these camouflage designs work in that way inside a PC as the designs actually help the memory to stand out visually. If you truly want memory that is discreet you would do better to look for a kit with a low profile heat spreader in plain black.

Compatibility
The reason that Sniper X caught our attention, apart from the interesting styling, is that it is compatible with AMD Ryzen. Up to this point is you wanted to buy G.Skill that was certified to work with AMD you have to select FlareX which uses Samsung B-die and tops out at 3200MHz. The updates for 2nd Gen. Ryzen helped memory compatibility so this Sniper X 3400MHz now sports the ‘Compatible with Ryzen’ sticker, whereas the Sniper X 3600MHz is only certified for Intel.

For absolute clarity, we have tried the Sniper X 3600Mhz with Ryzen 7 2700X and the system was unstable. On the other side of the scale we have not used 1st Gen. Ryzen with Sniper X so you need to double check your motherboard compatibility list.

The versions of Flare X and Sniper X that we have seen all use Samsung B-die memory. SniperX is available in speeds from 2400MHz to 3600MHz and it seems unlikely to us that the slowest speeds will also use B-die. You simply cannot generalise with this stuff and have to take each kit of DDR4 on its own merits.

The curious thing about Sniper X is that it is relatively tall for memory that does not have RGB on the top of the heat spreader. Each module is 43mm tall which is a full 10mm taller than Corsair Vengeance LPX. It has to be said the Corsair LPX is the king of low profile memory that uses a heat spreader, although some bare RAM is lower in height.

Performance and testing
We tested the Sniper X using the same test system as the HyperX Predator RGB and Patriot Viper RGB kits we recently reviewed.

Test System:
Processor: AMD Ryzen 7 2700X (4.0GHz all cores)
Motherboard: Asus ROG Crosshair VII Hero Wi-Fi
CPU cooler: Fractal Design Celsius S24
Graphics card: GTX 980 4GB
Power supply: Seasonic Prime Titanium 1000W
SSD: SK Hynix SC300
OS: Windows 10 64-bit.

At the time we did those reviews our GTX 1080 graphics cards were in use inside the Corsair 1000D Monster Build so the DDR4 was tested with a GTX 980 that was available. When we came to test the G.Skill Sniper X we used the GTX 980 again to maintain consistency.

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