Low voltage memory for a greener PC?

Posted on 14 May 2010 at 13:10

We recently got the opportunity to test some low voltage DDR3 from Kingston - or the HyperX LoVo as the company calls it. Housed in appropriately ‘green’ heat spreaders, the preview modules we saw ran at a voltage of 1.35V, compared to the standard DDR3 voltage of 1.5V.

In testing, our PC only saved around 3W when idling, and around double that when active. They aren’t huge savings, but on low-powered systems they could make a significant difference. However, you’ll need to check that your motherboard’s BIOS support such low voltage settings.

Our preview memory kit was rated at a whopping 1,866MHz, but more sedate 1,333MHz kits are now becoming available. Among these are even more power efficient 1.2V kits (part code KHX1333C9D3UK2/4GX for 4GB), which will double the power savings listed above.

This isn’t the cheapest memory around, with the 1.2V kit costing £120 compared to £90 for a basic 4GB kit from Crucial – which makes the case for saving money hard to argue at present. However, prices for low voltage memory are bound to drop in the future, and it’s worth keeping an eye out for such memory when searching for an upgrde or buying a new PC.

More details are available online at Kingston’s LoVo page.

Author: Seth Barton

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User comments

How far can it be overclocked?

May seem a daft question but did you try overclocking the 'green' modules at normal 1.5V in the test rig. I wonder how fast these modules could actually go without sticking to the official settings. Could be a way of justifying the daft price and HyperX branding instead of just referring to them as a 'green' product.

By mr_chips on 14 May 2010

Overclocking

We're not huge on overclocking memory around here, the performance gains are just too measly to bother with. The vast majority of PC owners will be better off investing their money or effort into a better CPU, or overclocking the CPU they have.

I did run the memory at its 1866MHz rated speed at 1.35V with no problems, but as soon as you start to overclock your CPU as well you might as well forget abut power-saving as you'll draw huge amounts of extra power in the process.

Because of this, we were more interested here in low-voltage memory as a power saving method, rather than as an overclocking tool.

By sethbarton1 on 17 May 2010

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