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“HyperX” timing will make no difference, but 2GB in 1 slot is nice

This RAM’s speed is 3-3-3-8 (CL3). This is tighter than most DDR2/533 RAM, which is 4-4-4-12 (CL4).

The tighter RAM timing _may_ help a _flaky_ laptop run without crashing, or if you are trying to overclock your laptop.

A great product if you have only 1 RAM-slot in a laptop or netbook but want to expand to 2GB. Extra RAM can make a huge difference in system performance.

However, the tighter CL3 timing compared to common CL4 RAM will make almost zero difference in overall system performance. For instance, I benchmarked this RAM against a CL4 module in a Thinkpad T43/p laptop. Using SiSoftware’s Sandra memory-bandwidth benchmark, the HyperX RAM _was_ slightly faster… by about 1% Likewise, using the wPrime (32 M) benchmark showed an improvement of about ~2% with the CL3 RAM vs CL4 (99 seconds vs. 101). This is too small to notice in normal use.

So — buy this if you have only 1 slot available (or 2 slots and you want to expand to 4GB - but make sure your laptop will support 4GB total). Don’t bother buying this thinking the CL3 RAM timing itself will make a noticeable difference. Kingston could have just as well made this product with 4-4-4-12 RAM and reduced the cost.

Update (2/6/2012): This item is currently on sale here for the lowest price I’ve seen.

The featured review for this product, Kingston HyperX 2 GB 533MHz DDR2 Notebook/Netbook Memory KHX4200S2LL/GR Electronics, was written by Mark N. Shepard.

The average rating for this item is 4.3 out of 5 stars, according to 3 reviews.