Recently I have taken a look at a few of the stock speed JEDEC DDR5 kits as well as an overclocked 6400 MHz kit as well. With those I was impressed with just how much the memory speeds and timings affected our Z790 13900K test bench in a variety of tests and games. Viper Gaming, Patriot’s gaming brand, must have seen that and thought that 6400 MHz DDR5 were a little too slow for us because they sent over two of their Venom DDR5 RGB kits, one clocked at 7200 MHz and the other at 7400 MHz to check out. So today I’m going to take a look at what the Viper kits have to offer, check out the fancy lighting, then put both to the test in our benchmark suite to see how they compare to the previously tested kits.

Product Name: Viper Gaming Venom DDR5 RGB

Review Sample Provided by: Patriot/Viper

Written by: Wes Compton

Amazon Affiliate Link:

Viper Gaming Venom DDR5 RGB 32GB 7200MHz - PVVR532G720C34K

Viper Gaming Venom DDR5 RGB 32GB 7400MHz - PVVR532G740C36K

Photos and Aesthetic

Patriot/Viper Gaming sent over both their Venom DDR5 RGB 7400 MHz 32GB kit as well as the Venom DDR5 RGB 7200 MHz 32 GB kit so we could check out the performance on both. Both are the RGB model and they do have a non-RGB model as well which replaces the white lightbar across the top with a black bar. With both kits being so similar the packaging on them is the same, in fact, the entire memory kits look the same aesthetically. They have the full-sized Viper Gaming logo on the top left corner of both boxes and then in the bottom right corner, they have the Viper logo again along with the Venom DDR5 logo to let you know what you have here. I like that the front of the packaging also has a picture of the memory which for the RGB model here also shows the lightbars on top lit up. The bottom left lets you know that these are the RGB models and also has a badge letting you know this is an XMP or Intel-focused kit. The drive speed and capacity are then printed on a sticker up in the top right corner with the capacity as the largest font and then the drive speed in a smaller font below that. The back of the box is surprisingly bright for having a black background. This is because of the RGB outline around the two windows on the back, as well as the RGB logo and RGB, outlines around the other badges up top. The two windows let you see about half of the stick including the information sticker on each stick which is always nice to be able to confirm that the correct memory is inside.

Then once you open the box up inside the Venom kit comes in its clear plastic clamshell tray that keeps it away from the outer edges to keep things safe. The box itself is set up to be hung from a pegboard or put on the shelf. Then along with the memory, each kit comes with the red and black Viper Gaming sticker. We no longer really have case badges but you can sticker something up.

As I mentioned before, both the 7200 and 7400 kits have the exact same aesthetics so we don’t really need to look at them individually. They come with a heatspreader which uses a few different colors and avoids the “standard” all-black or all-white styling that most kits seem to have. Each stick has a thin black aluminum heatspreader stamped with a few angled dashes in the design. Then on top of the base heatspreader, the Venom kit has a silver section added on top which gives that unique contrast. The silver section has the Viper name and the other end has the Viper logo, both gamer red. The angled dashes in the heatspreader then run up and give a peak at the lightbar across the top of the Venom kit. This will give a touch of RGB lighting if you can see the memory from the side and even the corners have the lightbar exposed as well. 

The back side of the Venom DDR5 kits have the exact same cooler design as on the front. Only this side also has an information sticker. These had the certification logos already on them in blue and then in black, you have the exact model name, the serial number including a barcode, and the speed and capacity as well in a small hard to read font. If you didn’t get a chance to check out the specifications on the previous page, the Viper Gaming Venom DDR5 kits have a shocking number of SKUs. Just in different clock speeds alone, they cover everything from 5200 MHz up to the 7400 MHz kit that we have here in this lineup. They have both RGB and non-RGB models and at 5200 MHz and 5600 Mhz, you can get the kit in a larger 64 GB or 2x 32GB version. Most are just the same 2x16GB kits we have here. There is also one 16 GB kit for the non-RGB with just one stick as well. So while I am checking out the 7200 MHz and 7400 MHz kits, you have options if you want something slower but still fast without leaving the Venom DDR5 lineup.

The lightbars across the top are pinned in place by the two sides of the heatspreader and they used the notches on the side with raised sections on the lightbar to lock everything together. They also have the Viper branding across the top in red.

In addition to checking out the ram itself, I did get a few pictures of the lighting as well. Both the 7400 MHz and 7200 MHz Venom kits have the same lighting setup so there isn’t any need to show both here. The diffuser on top does a good job of diffusing the lighting, helping to blend the lighting between the individual LEDs. By default, the Venom kit has a quick rotation through random colors and you get these cool blends. The kits can also be controlled using your motherboard’s RGB software which is what I will most likely be doing to make it easier to tie everything together. But if you just want the crazy rainbow RGB effect the stock effect for the Venom Kits looks great.

Test Rig and Procedures

Test System

CPU: Intel Core-i9 13900K – Live Pricing

(Power limit is set to Intel Spec, any additional overclocking is turned off)

Motherboard: Asus Z790 Extreme – Live Pricing

Video Card: Nvidia RTX 4090 – Live Pricing

Cooling: Corsair H100i Elite LCD Display - Live Pricing

Noctua NT-H1 Thermal Paste - Live Pricing

  Storage:    Sabrent Rocket Q4 2TB – Live Pricing

Power Supply: Thermaltake Toughpower GF3 1000W- Live Pricing

Case: Primochill Wetbench - Live Pricing

OS: Windows 11 Pro 64-bit - Live Pricing

Performance

Just recently I tested three of the Crucial JEDEC DDR5 kits which gave us a great look at the performance you can expect from basic 4800 MHz, 5200 MHz, and 5600 MHz kits. I then followed that up with a look at the Ripjaws S5 6400 MHz kit as well. Today's Viper Gaming Venom DDR5 RGB kits are on a different level however with their 7200 MHz and 7400 MHz clock speeds. The 7200 MHz kit has a CAS latency of 34 and the rest of its timings are 42-42-84. The higher clock speed on the 7400 MHz kit does require a higher CAS latency of 36 and the timings on that kit have been toned down as well at 44-44-110. Both kits have a voltage of 1.45v for those XMP profiles. They do also have a few other optional clock speeds in their XMP 3.0 profiles. The 7200 kit for example has 7000 and 6800 profiles in there as well as the JEDEC profiles. The 7400 kit has 7200 and 7000 profiles in there as well to give options should your setup not be able to handle things. I did include the CPUz screenshots for both kits if you want to see any of the other details on the XMP profiles. I also used these to double-check to make sure our kits were running at the correct speeds before diving into tests.

My first tests were with AIDA64 and its memory benchmark. This is a good look at pure speed numbers and I have tested read, write, copy, and latency. The 7400 and 7200 kits are of course up at the top here, the Read, Write, and Copy tests do a great job of showing the improvement in performance improvement the clock speed can give you. The latency results show how much the lower CAS latency helps and the memory clock speed to a lesser extent, but you can see a big performance gap between the overclocked kits and the JEDEC kits.

In 7 Zip I ran the built-in benchmark 10 times to get a total GIPS for each kit. The Venom 7200 MHz kit does improve on the Ripjaws S5 6400 kit by a little over 2 GIPS. The gap between the two or even up to the 7400 MHz kit isn’t that much, nothing like the gap between the JEDEC kits and the overclocked kits.

For Handbrake I transcode a video at the 1080p fast setting, just like we do in our CPU tests. I then document the average frame rate of the rendering just before it finishes up. These ended up being interesting with the 7200 Venom DDR5 kit being a hair faster than the 7400 MHz Venom kit. Both were still faster than the Ripjaws S5 6400 MHz kit, however.

I did run the full PCMark 10 benchmark to see how it might be affected by different memory.  Both of the Venom kits were slower than the Ripjaws S5 here with PCMark 10 not taking advantage of the extra clock speed or we could just be seeing a small variation in results with PCMark 10 not being affected by the different kits at all.

Before getting into the actual in-game performance I did want to check out the synthetic numbers with 3DMark’s Time Spy benchmark. The Venom DDR5 7400 MHz kit is of course up at the top here with a decent gap between it and the Venom DDR5 7200 MHz kit. Surprisingly the 7200 MHz and 6400 MHz kits didn’t have much of a gap between the two.

Our new test suite has added in-game tests as well on top of the standard synthetic tests. More than anything I was curious just how much of a difference you might see depending on the ram you go with. Now most of these benchmarks are laid out like our CPU tests with the 1080p resolution and the monster RTX 4090 taking GPU performance out of the picture and relying on CPU performance. So this gives us a good look at if/when there is a difference but keep in mind if you are gaming at 4K or on a lower-end GPU that once back to being GPU limited the frame rate improvements between kits would be smaller and less noticeable. That said it's not a surprise at all that the Viper Venom DDR5 kits are both at the top of each of the in-game charts. What was a surprise though was how much performance you could get with some of the kits, like in Far Cry the Venom kits are seeing 20 FPS and more over the 5600 MHz and lower kits. Same in Borderlands 3 as well. TF2 didn’t see as much of an improvement, not that you need more than 300 FPS in that game. Then in CS:GO even just between the 4700 and 7200 kits the performance jumped up 18 FPS.

Last up I wanted to check out the temperatures that both Venom DDR5 kits would run at if I put them under the AIDA64 memory stress test. This worked fine with the Venom 7200 MHz kit. It did run significantly warmer than the other kits at 69c. While doing that I also got a thermal image. The heatspreaders were doing their job and there weren’t any main hotspots except for in between the two sticks. Getting a little more airflow around our test bench would help a lot with that, but it is something to keep in mind. But when I went to test the 7400 MHz kit I had no luck at all. Both kits were pushing the limits of the memory controller on our 13900K and the Z790 Extreme motherboard. Running the 7400 MHz kit on the stress test would cause an immediate failure. I did see a few results in my testing that looking back did indicate that this kit is right on the edge of what our setup can handle.

Overall and Final Verdict

The wide range of options when it comes to DDR5 can be overwhelming, the stock speeds are down in the 4800/5200/5600 range and from there overclocked memory has a wide range just in clock speeds alone and that is before we also take into account timings and other options like capacities, aesthetics, and XMP vs Expo. You can see all of that when you check out the Viper Gaming lineup with their Venom which has a long list of clock speeds available. But one thing that they do to help is to consolidate the AMD and Intel lineups into one lineup and have XMP and Expo options on all of the Venom kits. You can get RGB or non-RGB kits and most of their capacities target the 32GB sweet spot but they do have a few larger and smaller options as well.

The Venom DDR5 RGB lineup goes all the way up to 7400 MHz and today I put those and the 7200 MHz kits to the test. In most tests the performance difference even from those down to a 6400 MHz kit was impressive. But the 7400 kit did push the limits of our CPU and motherboard and while it didn’t fail in any of our testing it failed right away when I did thermal tests. For styling Patriot has kept their Viper lineup unique and the Venom DDR5 kits are no different with both black and silver for the heatspreader design and then red for the branding, it is a little less subtle than what a lot of kits are doing these days and with that, you are going to either love it or hate it. The RGB lighting looks great and works well, including support for all of the standard motherboard RGB software but you do have a non-RGB option for anyone who doesn’t care for that.

As for pricing, the 7200MHz kit is currently $167.99 on Amazon which is cheaper than any other 7200 MHz CAS latency 34 32GB kit listed on Newegg (this kit isn’t on Newegg right now). So they have it priced well. The 7400 MHz kit is a little different, there just isn’t anything on Newegg that compares with zero 7400 MHz kits at the same capacity. It sells for $174.99 right now putting it not far over the 7200 MHz kit.l For comparison the next closest kits you can find are the 7600 MHz options and with the same CAS latency those are selling for $219, so Patriot has that priced well as also. One thing is for sure, from the looks of it you can count on the Venom DDR5 kits to be a good value and the performance is there making them a good buy.

Live Pricing:

Viper Gaming Venom DDR5 RGB 32GB 7200MHz - PVVR532G720C34K

Viper Gaming Venom DDR5 RGB 32GB 7400MHz - PVVR532G740C36K

Author Bio

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.