Overall and Final Verdict

The last Patriot Memory kit we have had in the office was YEARS ago but it is still to this day one of my favorite looking memory kits. Seriously check that kit out! Now over the years, memory has become more and more of a commodity but with Ryzen taking advantage of memory speeds the interest and need for faster memory has come back around. In addition to that, the push for RGB memory reignited some interest in making sure you have a kit that you like or in the case of the Viper Steel kit I’ve been taking a look at, the lack of RGB might be one of its best features. The grey finish with black trim matches the look almost every motherboard manufacturer has been going with, color neutral to let the RGB lighting do the work. In this case, you can save money by not overspending on an RGB kit and get a kit that still matches your build and frankly looks good as well.

Patriot Memory has created the Viper Gaming lineup which the Viper branding has been part of Patriot Memory forever, even that Tri-Channel kit I took a look at years ago was a Viper kit. The gaming line, however, lets them brand with that “gaming” look and I hate to have to put it in quotes but it is a bit of a meme at this point. However in this case that just means a clean look built around a quick kit. The Viper Steel lineup has their fastest clock speeds available. The 3866MHz version they sent over to test wasn’t in that fastest category, but it is still a fast kit. In fact, it outperformed a lot of other kits in my testing and at least a few of those cost significantly more than this kit.

That leads me to the main feature of the Viper Steel kit. Patriot Memory has these priced well. They aren’t available on Newegg from what I can see, but you can get this exact kit for $119.99 on Amazon. The next cheapest kit with the same clock speed and 2x8GB configuration is the Trident Z kits from G.Skill which run $172.99. That is a huge gap. Really the only downside and part of the reason for the price gap is all of the other 3866MHz kits have a little better timings. In fact, if you run through some of the other clock speeds on PCPartPicker or on Newegg and Amazon you will find that the Viper Steel kits are the cheapest at all of the speeds that you can get them in up in the higher speeds like 4000MHz, 4133MHz, and 4400MHz. They don’t compete with some of the entry-level kits, but the Viper Steel kits are a little bit of a hidden gem in the higher clock speeds.

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Author Bio
garfi3ld
Author: garfi3ldWebsite: http://lanoc.org
Editor-in-chief
You might call him obsessed or just a hardcore geek. Wes's obsession with gaming hardware and gadgets isn't anything new, he could be found taking things apart even as a child. When not poking around in PC's he can be found playing League of Legends, Awesomenauts, or Civilization 5 or watching a wide variety of TV shows and Movies. A car guy at heart, the same things that draw him into tweaking cars apply when building good looking fast computers. If you are interested in writing for Wes here at LanOC you can reach out to him directly using our contact form.

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