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[letsreview postid=”86541″]
Adata isn’t a household name in the west, but it is has been the second-biggest manufacturer of RAM since 2016 worldwide. Today, we’re looking at one of the new ranges, the gamer-focused XPG offshoot, and its D41 Spectrix DDR4 RGB 3600MHz, with one stick of 8GB capacity.
While the timings for this DIMM should be CL17, on our Ryzen system it defaulted to CL18 on the XMP settings. Adata’s XPG D41 has one of the best RGB implementations I’ve seen, with a nice white frosted lightbar that evens out any hotspots to provide smooth transitions between color changes. The dark gray heat spreader is modeled after armor, and it’s doing a nice job of protecting the precious DRAM modules underneath.
To the testbench!
Thaiphoon Burner
First, we check out the DIMM in Thaiphoon Burner, a handy little utility that can read the firmware on a stick of RAM and usually tell us some pretty important information. Reading the XPG D41 Spectrix DIMM shows us that it’s set to 3600MHz on one profile, with a second fallback profile of 2666MHz.
It also tells us that the speed is due to the sought-after Samsung B-die IC. That’s important for overclocking, and also for compatibility with Ryzen systems. Samsung B-die is the DRAM modules you want as a consumer.
AIDA64
AIDA64’s Cache & Memory benchmark tells us how much pure bandwidth we’ll get from our RAM, plus the performance of the various cache memories on our CPU. Now, if you think the memory bandwidth scores seem low to usual review scores – you’d be right until you notice that as I’m only testing one DIMM, the testing was in single-channel mode. If I had two DIMMs on hand, those scores would be doubled, putting this XPG D41 Spectrix 3600MHz kit at the top of my personal leaderboard, as the fastest stick of RAM I’ve tested to date.
Overclocking
Now, before we go further into this section, just know that I’m using a 1st-gen Ryzen platform right now. Unfortunately, my Intel platform is off for repairs so I don’t think I’ll be able to push the XPG D41 Spectrix stick much further than the 3600MHz rated speed. I’ve not seen many DIMMs go past that 3600MHz mark on Ryzen, so it’s going to be interesting to me to see if I can get any more speed out of it.
Okay, so my overclocking journey on the Ryzen 1800X ended at 3733MHz, CL18, 1.38V. Honestly, that’s still higher than I thought it was going to be and I can’t wait to get my Intel platform running again so I can push this stick. Last year Adata pushed one of the D41 Spectrix DIMMs to over 5000MHz on air, so if I get anywhere near that I’ll be stoked. I’ll be revisiting this once my i9-9900K is humming along.
So should I buy it?
RGB RAM is everywhere nowadays, with lots of options for you as a consumer. That said, most of the options either are for nice lights but poor quality DRAM chips, or quality DRAM chips with tacked-on lighting. Adata has done something special here though with the XPG D41 Spectrix, with the most even RGB lightbar I’ve seen on a piece of PC equipment, with quality IC underneath them proving that the D41 aren’t all style over substance.
With a 16GB kit running $170 right now on Amazon, it’s also one of the cheapest 3600MHz kits on the market, with aggressive pricing that’s no doubt helped by Adata’s market position.
If you’re planning a PC build, the D41 Spectrix range is definitely worth putting on your shortlist – you’ll get great RGB, quality IC and some change in your pocket. It’s also worth noting that this is the first kit above 3466MHz that I’ve managed to run at rated speeds on a 1st-gen Ryzen system.
A sample unit was provided for the purpose of this review.
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