A Closer Look

With each stick in the F3-2133C9Q-32GXH kit carrying a total 8 GB capacity, the 32 GB kit looks like so many other RipjawsX kits that have been on the market for the past 16 months or so. The RipjawsX family of products is built for the P67 and Z68 LGA 1155 chipsets, and each features the same distinctive design, although there are different colors to chose from as well. On one side we find the product label on top of the flashy RipjawsX sticker, which to my delight faces towards the socket on Intel LGA 2011 and LGA 1155 motherboards. The other side features the same sticker, which matches the colors cheme of many enthusiast motherboards on the market today.


The heatsink's underside mates with the eight memory ICs below it, and wraps around the top to meet with a matching pattern no matter what direction the sticks are installed in. The 10 protruding fins are designed to stick out slightly into the case interior to help disperse heat, and produce a tunnel of air that travels over the top of the DIMM and down onto the PCB surface below.


With a listed price of $399.99, each stick is $100, a fair bit more than buying two 4 GB sticks in a pair, rated at similar speeds. That's a pretty high per-stick price for what has been an affordable product line since its inception.


Close inspection of the stick does reveal several details that hint that this isn't your standard RipjawsX memory stick, but I must say that the matching heatsink and PCB really do look sharp, and the black matte finish throughout helps keep the stick from looking overly stylized.


The label itself shows the model number, timings, voltage, speed, and also indicates that this single stick is part of a kit, that is XMP-ready. There's also a holographic emblem and production date on the left side, revealing that this kit is fresh off the assembly line. The 8-layer PCB itself bears a few specific markings, including a product ID number as well as the customary numbers on each side indicating the PCB layer level, and the 8th layer is revealed to be on the sticker side of the modules, as shown in the third image above.


On the opposite side we find a small sticker that says "G.SKILL Warranty", that I've not seen on my other RipjawsX kits, and if you look just above that, you can see the "1" indicating the first PCB layer. On the opposite end of the sticker we find the letters "GC" in gold, which I think stands for "G.Skill Corporation", but I'm not entirely sure on that one.

Normally I'd take a peek at the ICs contained underneath but I didn't want to molest the high-value kit . The heatsinks are quite firmly attached with an adhesive thermal strip of some sort, so I'm not sure what actual ICs are contained below. There cannot be many ICs to make 8 GB sticks that can reach these speeds easily so I'm not really too concerned about what actual ICs it contains either. I'm sure more information will come out in the weeks ahead, as although you can find these sticks at most larger etailers today, they were never officially launched with much fanfare, except under a different product name and featuring a different heatsink or two at CeBIT just 14 days ago.