GeIL EVO Leggera 8GB DDR3 1866MHz Dual Channel Kit Review

There has been no better time to buy cheap, high performance memory with many manufacturers dropping their prices to an all time low. Today we are looking at one such high performance kit from GEIL - the EVO Leggera 8GB clocked at 1866mhz. At only £35.99 inc vat this certainly won't cause too much damage to the credit card. Can such inexpensive memory have any overclocking headroom? The EVO LEGGERA is one of the latest kits from GEIL, with 'Leggera' meaning 'light weight' in the performance world. This memory is kitted out with the Leggera low profile heat spreader in a bright Turquoise Blue finish. This is designed with GeIL's MTCD which stands for 'Maximum Thermal Conduction & Dissipation' technology. Features:- PC3-14900 1866MHz CAS 10-10-10-32 Designed for PC GeIL EVO Leggera Design 1.50v VDIMM Limited Lifetime Warranty The Evo Leggera ships in a small box with the name of the product on the front. There is also a small window to view the blue heatspreaders. Some windows are cut into the back of the packaging as shown above, to highlight the timings. Not much of a bundle, just a simple 'warning' sticker, explaining SPD timings and voltage settings. The memory incorporates low profile heatspreaders which are ideal for the end user who will be using an oversized heatsink on their processor. The bright Turquoise heatspreaders are certainly eye catching! On this page we present some super high resolution images of the product taken with the 24.5MP Nikon D3X camera and 24-70mm ED lens. These will take much longer to open due to the dimensions, especially on slower connections. If you use these pictures on another site or publication, please credit Kitguru.net as the owner/source. You can right click and ‘save as’ to your computer to view later. For the review today we are using the Asus Maximus V Formula Z77 motherboard. This is one of the finest Z77 motherboards on the market and we have had great success when overclocking memory from many companies. The Maximus V Formula Z77 motherboard posted first time with a safe default setting of 1,333mhz. We accessed the XMP profile and it highlighted the correct 9-10-9-28 timings at 1.5V. A quick double check in the memory preset timings panel shows the correct timings. CPUz highlights the memory speeds and specifications at various speeds. System validation at these speeds is available over here. We will look at overclocking the memory, later in the review. Today we are using an Intel Core i7 3770k processor with an ASUS Maximus V Formula motherboard. We are testing the memory kit at 1866mhz with default timings of 9-10-9-28 @ 1.5 volts Test System: Processor: Intel Core i7 3770k @ 4.8ghz Motherboard: ASUS Maximus V Formula. Cooler: Corsair H100 Liquid Cooler. Graphics card: Sapphire HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition Power supply: Corsair HX850 Boot drives: Intel 510 120GB Storage drives: Patriot Wildfire 240GB & Samsung 2TB Storage drive. OS: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit. ASUS Maximus V Formula comparison memory: 8GB Kingston HyperX Predator 2,666mhz 8GB Patriot Viper 3 Intel Masters Limited Edition 2,133mhz 8GB ‘generic’ 1600mhz CL9 8GB ‘generic’ 1333mhz CL9 Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H Z77 comparison system: Processor: Intel Core i7 3770k. Motherboard: Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H motherboard. Cooler: Arctic Cooling Freezer 13. Power Supply: ADATA 1200W. Optical Drive: Asus BluRay Drive. Chassis: Cooler Master Cosmos 2. Monitors: Dell U3011, 3x Ilyama ProLite E2472HDD. Boot Drive: Kingston SSDNow V+200 90GB. Storage Drive: Patriot 240GB Wildfire. Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H Z77 system comparison memory: 8GB Patriot Viper Xtreme Division 2 2133mhz 8GB G.Skill TridentX 2400mhz Software: SiSoft Sandra PCMark 7 MaxxMem 2 Super Pi Studio Max SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software. Sandra is a (girl’s) name of Greek origin that means “defender”, “helper of mankind”. We think that’s quite fitting. It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc. Native ports for all major operating systems are available: Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x86) Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x64) Windows 2003/R2, 2008/R2* (IA64) Windows Mobile 5.x (ARM CE 5.01) Windows Mobile 6.x (ARM CE 5.02) All major technologies are supported and taken advantage of: SMP – Multi-Processor MC – Multi-Core SMT/HT – Hyper-Threading MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, AVX, FMA – Multi-Media instructions GPGPU, DirectX, OpenGL – Graphics NUMA – Non-Uniform Memory Access AMD64/EM64T/x64 – 64-bit extensions to x86 IA64 – Intel* Itanium 64-bit Even though this memory is clocked lower, the tight 9-10-9 timings help push performance to 24GB/s which is not far behind some of the looser 2,666mhz modules we have tested this year. PCMark 7 includes 7 PC tests for Windows 7, combining more than 25 individual workloads covering storage, computation, image and video manipulation, web browsing and gaming. Specifically designed to cover the full range of PC hardware from netbooks and tablets to notebooks and desktops, PCMark 7 offers complete PC performance testing for Windows 7 for home and business use. A very impressive final score, highlighting the well rounded system with fast graphics card, solid state drive and memory. MaxxMem2 PreView is a useful, free program to rate memory performance. It can be downloaded over here. An excellent score, above the Patriot Viper Xtreme Division 2133mhz. The tighter timings help enhance the score. Super Pi is used by a huge audience, particularly to check stability when overclocking processors and memory. If a system is able to calculate PI to the 2 millionth place after the decimal without mistake, it is considered to be stable in regards to RAM and CPU. This program will also allow us to outline performance gains created by overclocked CPU and RAM frequencies. Good scores from the Super PI test, with a final time of 7 minutes and 12 seconds. V2011 is the first release of 3DStudio Max to fully support the Windows 7 operating system. This is a professional level tool that many people use for work purposes and our test will show any possible differences between board design today. Autodesk 3ds Max Design 2011 software offers compelling new techniques to help bring designs to life by aggregating data, iterating ideas, and presenting the results. Streamlined, more intelligent data exchange workflows and innovative new modeling and visualization tools help significantly increase designers’ creativity and productivity, enabling them to better explore, validate, and communicate the stories behind their designs. Major new features: Slate: A node based material editor. Quicksilver: Hardware renderer with multithreaded rendering engine that utilizes both CPU and GPU. Extended Graphite Modeling Toolset 3ds Max Composite: A HDRI-capable compositor based on Autodesk Toxik. Viewport Canvas toolset for 3D and 2D texture painting directly in the viewport Object Painting: use 3D geometry as ‘brushes’ on other geometry Character Animation Toolkit (CAT): now integrated as part of the base package Autodesk Material Library: Over 1200 new photometrically accurate shaders Additional file format support: includes native support for Sketchup, Inventor FBX file linking Save to Previous Release (2010) We created a new 6200×2400 scene and recorded the time for the hardware to finalise the render. Excellent results, with a final time of 5 minutes and 13 seconds - around 4 seconds slower than the same system with G.Skill TridentX clocked at 2,400mhz. To overclock, we reduced the multiplier from 48 to 44 - this gives us some room to work inside our limitations of 4.8ghz. We increased the BLCK/PEG frequency to 109, and set the memory to 2,180mhz in the ASUS bios. We experienced some instability so loosened the timings to 10-11-10-36 which doesn't have an overly negative effect on the results. We found this was stable. Our final clock speed was 4796mhz - very close to the 4,800mhz figure used earlier in the review. We could push to 2,400mhz but the timings needed loosened further to 11-12-11, this lowered the scores and gave worse benchmark results. System validation at these speeds is available over here. The overclock helped improve the time by 2 seconds, to 5 minutes and 11 seconds. The overclock helps generate another 3GB/s of memory bandwidth in SiSoft Sandra. A score of 27GB/s+ for a dual channel configuration is extremely impressive. The increased memory speed helps to improve copy, read and write results - by a noticeable margin too. The final scores are very impressive, aided by the still tight timings. The GeIL EVO Leggera 8GB DDR3 1866MHz Dual Channel memory is a budget kit targeting the mainstream audience, and those people on a tight budget. Performance out of the box is impressive, thanks to the tight timings of 9-10-9 @ 1,866mhz. This ensures that the EVO Leggera can actually hold a performance level close to many 2,133mhz kits available today. Compatibility is also a strong point as we tested this memory on a handful of ASROCK, MSI and Gigabyte motherboards and didn't experience any issues with the XMP profile setting. There is some additional headroom from the EVO Leggera, and we managed to overclock the memory to 2,180mhz by loosening the timings a little to 10-11-10. This had a positive effect on overall system performance increasing bandwidth by over 3 GB/s. It is actually possible to overclock the memory to 2,400mhz however the timings need loosened even further which degrades overall performance. There are many high quality memory kits available on the market today and GeIL have managed to get this EVO Leggera kit onto the market at a budget price point. It deserves attention. Overclockers stock this memory kit for £35.99 inc vat. At this price we have no hesitations in giving this memory our highest award. A gamer working to a budget really does not need to spend additional money. 8GB is more than enough for a new gaming system build and the tight timings help improve performance when compared to some competing kits clocked at 2,133mhz. We also like the fact that the heatspreaders are a low profile design. Pros: Great out of the box performance. overclocks well while maintaining tight timings. low profile heat spreaders. extremely high value for money. Cons: So much competition today. Kitguru says: At under £40 this is a bargain kit, ideal for a performance gaming system build.