Introduction

Kingston has been around for over 25 years now. To me, they've always been a quality brand focusing on reliability and longevity. They've not always been at the forefront of performance with their memory products, but that changed 10 years ago with the introduction of their HyperX brand, which had Kingston commit a big part of its resources to producing high-end products that meet the discerning consumer's needs. Today, we have HyperX memory, SSDs, and USB drives, and the HyperX line has expanded to offer more than just high-performance goods in every segment.

After having been ranked numerous times as one of the top 500 private companies at Forbes, Kingston says this about HyperX and their recently launched products:

Since 2002, our HyperX products have been the memory of choice for gamers, computer enthusiasts, overclockers and system builders. The newly launched HyperX 10th Anniversary Edition Memory encompasses ultimate style and performance. As part of the Genesis family line, this stunning low-profile memory enhances the overall PC experience.

To help commemorate those ten years, Kingston sent me one of their HyperX Genesis 10th Anniversary Special Edition DDR3 memory kits, and a couple others as well. The set we are looking at today is one of those other sets: the HyperX Beast 2400 C11 kit. It is a smaller 8 GB kit as opposed to the 16 GB Genesis kit I looked at just a short while ago. Although it seems to sport similar timings and stock speeds in a different metal husk, I was pleasantly surprised to find something completely different. This isn't a new kit on the market, but it is, when it comes to enthusiast memory, a pretty affordable kit that comes clocked at speeds pretty much every current platform, Intel and AMD alike, supports when overclocking. Is there a Beast hidden within? Let's poke it and find out!

Specifications

Packaging

The packaging of the Kingston HyperX Beast 2400 C11 8 GB kit is pretty basic—made of two molded plastic shells that also serve as a static barrier. There's a big Kingston logo on a big red sticker that wraps around the package from front to back. It obscures what the sticks look like a fair bit.


It can be pretty hard to get the sticks out of the container since it holds onto them so firmly, so there's a divot on one side to help get the sticks out, but it felt like I was going to bend the stick itself; it was in so tight. That little divot is truly there for a good reason. Other than the two sticks and that paper leaflet, there's nothing else to be found, but nothing else is needed!

A Closer Look

You can tell that the folks at Kingston gave careful consideration to the logo placement on these sticks as both sides are almost identical—one is missing the sticker with the label on it. There is not a lot of usable information on that label other than that it is part of a set of two sticks and that its operating voltage is 1.65V. Anything else is going to take a part number decoder to decipher.


Looking at the profile of the sticks, I can see that Beast reference in the design of the metal heatsink, with the area that contains the logos and label being the mouth, the fins up top being hair, and ears and eyes in-between.


That heatsink has been formed out of two pieces of metal that have been stamped into shape to meet at the top of the DIMM for a tunnel air can travel down into, which baths both sides of the DIMM in fresh air.


I took a close look at either end of the DIMMs for something that might disclose anything useful about overclocking them, but I found nothing other than a number referencing the PCB itself. I didn't even see anything denoting the PCB's number of layers, but documentation from Kingston states that the HyperX Beast sticks use an 8-layer PCB.

Initial Setup

Getting the Kingston HyperX Beast sticks installed is no different than with any other DIMM. The sticks measure in at 46.37mm by my digital calipers, tall enough to interfere with some heatsinks but not all.


Getting the sticks into my memory test system presented some difficulties based on that height, but I've got to say that they match my ASUS Maximus V Extreme really well.


The HyperX Beast sticks did run afoul of the fan on my CoolerMaster TPC 812 cooler, but I still managed to mount the fan, although the fan sat a bit high on the heatsink, as you can see in the second image above. You'll want to keep this in mind if you use a tower cooler like the TPC 812, but with the prevalence of AIO water coolers on today's market and the number of users I see using similar or better, this won't be an issue for most.