With a fair number of X99 motherboard reviews under our belt, we felt that it was time to focus a little more on the memory side of this new platform. As you might already know, the enthusiast-oriented Intel Haswell-E processors make use of the new DDR4 memory standard, and with a quad-channel memory interface they require quite a bit of it. When you combine the need for four modules with the fact that DDR4 is still a very niche item, the end result is that most DDR4 memory kits are quite pricey at the moment.

The first DDR4 memory kit that we reviewed was a highly clocked G.Skill Ripjaws4 DDR4-3000 model, which although impressive by any measure was quite pricey at almost $400USD/$450CAD...and it has gotten even pricier as the weeks go by. What this means is that although this new memory format is unquestionably a critical part of this forward-looking platform, it also represents a significant part of the overall build cost of any LGA2011-3 system. With that in mind, today we are looking at a memory kit that is more reasonably priced, while not giving up much of the clock speed advantage that makes DDR4 special.