Introduction

Those who have found themselves in a local electronics store looking for a USB flash drive over the past decade might have seen Lexar-branded products on shelves. In the early days of home PCs, the company was a pioneer in flash memory. Later bought and owned by Micron Technology, the company again went up for sale in 2017. Longsys became the new owner, quickly expanding sales globally with numerous new product launches by rebranding some of the company's prior best sellers. Lexar has been known for its quality flash memory products for a number of years, which certainly holds true for many of the company's professional PRO line of flash memory products.

DDR4 has reached full maturity in the last year with kits coming out that give a new meaning to the word performance. However, a majority of consumers are not interested in buying the bleeding edge of today's technological advancements. Instead, many are looking for products that are more aesthetically pleasing and less of a hit to the wallet. This is not to say performance memory does not have its place among computer enthusiasts; however, it generally takes considerable time to get these types of kits operational at their respected frequencies and timings. Dealing with manually tweaking settings in the BIOS is why most of the market for DDR4 is not top-tier. If at all possible, less hassle and being Plug and Play is ideal.

Lexar once again is pushing into new territory with RGB-enhanced memory kits for home computers. These kits are sold as either 3200 MT/s or 3600 MT/s in 16 GB or 32 GB configurations. In this review, we will cover the Hades OC RGB 32 GB (2x 16 GB) kit rated for 3600 MT/s. Lexar's RGB portion supports lighting control software developed by the major motherboard manufacturers, including ASUS Aura Sync, GIGABYTE RGB Fusion, MSI Mystic Light Sync, and ASRock Polychrome Sync.


The Lexar Hades OC RGB kit I have for review today follows the new mid-tier standard for timings using 18-22-22-42 at a modest 1.35 V. This change is due to many of the ICs that have the ability for tighter timings either being reserved for premium kits for their wide binning range or simply being EOL and no longer in production. Going forward, we will start to see a lot more mainstream memory kits using similarly loose timings. Now that we know what we are reviewing, it is time to see what makes this Lexar kit stand out in an overcrowded market.

Specifications