Team Group's move to adopt RGB into their memory products is hardly unexpected; everyone is doing it these days. One of the first things to consider is the added cost; does having fully customizable LEDs justify an added cost for you? If you answered no, you might just as well stop reading now. These sticks are definitely NOT for you. If you answered YES, then you've got a decent option here in this Night Hawk RGB kit if you prefer your sticks in a singular or an ever-changing rainbow of colors; the choice is yours.

The software part of RGB memory is still not where I'd like it to be. Many brands are supporting ASUS's AURA Sync, so LED control on their DIMMs and Team Group's T-Force Hawk RGB sticks are no different. The version of software provided to me by Team Group worked well, but I am not sure of whether end users can get access to the same version right now. Having to rely on a third party, the board maker, to get full functionality here is a bit weird, especially if you don't happen to own one of the supported boards or have no plans to buy one. It sucks, but as I said just a moment ago, that is what most memory companies are doing right now. Something about what ASUS offers has got all these memory vendors on board, but the rest of the industry that isn't ASUS, well those users are very much out of luck when it comes to finding sticks that will work for them, and that's terrible to me. It's just too limiting. There is at least one memory brand that offers software that works on multiple motherboard brands, but that software unfortunately does not work with Team Group's Night Hawk RGB sticks.

Lastly, we have to come to the question of whether adding these RGB LEDs impacts performance at all, and that is a question that is hard to answer. In the results here, I have three sets of sticks from Team Group, two of which include LEDs and one that does not. Yet not all these sets have the same memory IC underneath their heatspreaders, so that does make such a comparison that much more difficult. Taking a look at the benchmarks, the three sets of Team Group sticks trade blows back and forth many times. If there is any real differences to be had, those differences are very minor and have little to no impact on actual performance. The actual stick's XMP profile matters more for that than the inclusion of LEDs, RGB or otherwise, it seems.

Team Group's T-Force sticks, all of them, appeal to me, and each does so in different ways. The T-Force Night Hawk RGB sticks offer everything the past non-RGB sticks do and the option of not having to worry about choosing the right LED color, or whether the LEDs are going to match after a hardware swap. Now, as a guy that upgrades very often, I have to deal with that, which makes such flexibility worth paying for. The only thing I would change with these sticks (well, other than the software bit), would be for these sticks to come in higher speeds out of the box. As it stands now, if you want more, buy the 3200 MHz sticks and clock them up, which should net you decent results.

I'm not one to recommend people buy memory for overclocking purposes. I will always suggest you buy the exact speed you want. Yet I will also suggest that you want 3200 MHz sticks or higher for any obvious performance differences to take place. Memory speeds have very little impact on overall system performance, but there is most definitely a noticeable difference when you crack the 3200 MHz "barrier". These sticks, at 3000 MHz, aren't quite fast enough, but they are close for sure.