In a market saturated by RGB offering vying for enthusiast appeal, brands are still challenge to offer options for customers that require something less extravagant. People who want a certain level of performance together with style but don’t want to spend the extra cash on lighting usually opt to the traditional midrange offering of heatsink covered sticks. Given today’s market status, some would prefer to focus more on performance and capacity than aesthetics for their first builds. With regards to offerings, its still a big market and despite how limited SKUs available out there right now from many manufacturers, its easy to find out the segmentation that brands usually divide their product portfolio in to. KINGMAX is a relatively younger player in the enthusiast memory market but this company has been gunning to provide competitive products for enthusiasts and average consumers for a good number of years now.
In this review we’ll be taking a look at the latest entry in KINGMAX’s enthusiast line of memory products: the new KINGMAX ZEUS DRAGON DDR4 memory. Taking after the flagship ZEUS high-end memory, the ZEUS DRAGON is a standard height DIMM module featuring their new Dragon heatsink that is designed for maximum heat dissipation for optimal performance.
The KING MAX ZEUS DRAGON comes in two variants: the red heatsink and black heatsink models. They’re currently listed as two different product under KINGMAX’s product page and while KINGMAX doesn’t state it, the ZEUS DRAGON Black series seem to be the higher-performance models coming in at DDR4-3000 and DDR4-3200 speeds with both CL16 timings. The ZEUS DRAGON Red variant comes in with DDR4-2400 and DDR4-2800, again both of which are CL17. All KINGMAX ZEUS DRAGON with the exception of the DDR4-2400 variant run at 1.35v.
Both Red and Black series ZEUS DRAGON memory come with an aluminum heatsink with a diamond-cut dragon etching. KINGMAX intends to blend Western and Eastern culture but that’s definitely up to the beholder on how they interpret the design. As always, black and red seems to be the most dominant color scheme in the gaming and enthusiast market so its a wise move for KINGMAX to go with these colors.
For those concerned about height clearances with certain coolers, they are your average size so clearance shouldn’t be an issue unless its caused by the cooler itself. Be sure to check with your cooler first but since these are standard sized, we don’t see any issues with modern coolers.
For this review, we’ll be testing both the DDR4-3000 C16 Black series and the DDR4-2800 Red series of the KINGMAX ZEUS.
Overclocking
Before we proceed with our benchmarks, let’s see how far we can go with the KINGMAX ZEUS DRAGON modules on trying to get higher clocks or tighter timings. By default, the ZEUS DRAGON DDR4-3000 comes in at 16-17-17-36 which we wanted to try to set a bit lower given its lower latency advantage over the Red models. Stopping down at 15-16-16-32, the system refused to post. Given that that was just one tick down from the default XMP profile for the DDR4-3000 Black sticks, we figured it was already the best the chips could go.
We tried bumping up the clock on the DDR4-3000, first trying to past DDR4-3200 with the default XMP timings. Ultimately, we could only bump it to DDR4-3100 with 17-19-19-36 timings.
The DDR4-2800 Red model of the ZEUS DRAGON proves to be a bit more promising. With a 17-17-17-39 timing, we figure it could go further.
Copy the settings of the DDR4-3000 Black, the ZEUS DRAGON Red DDR4-2800 managed to OC to DDR4-3000 with ease. We’ll be using these OC setting in our benchmarks for reference purposes.
Performance Testing
Test Setup
Processor: Intel Core i7 7700K
Motherboard: ASUS ROG MAXIMUS IX APEX
Memory: KINGMAX ZEUS DRAGON DDR4-3000, KINGMAX ZEUS DRAGON DDR4-2800 (2x8GB)
Storage: WD Blue SSD 1TB
Graphics Card: ZOTAC GTX 1080 Ti AMP! Edition
Cooling: Thermaltake Water 3.0 360mm
Power Supply: Seasonic Platinum P1000
Display: ViewSonic VX2475Smhl-4K
Thermal Images
KINGMAX ZEUS DRAGON RED DDR4-2800
KINGMAX ZEUS DRAGON BLACK DDR4-3000
Ambient temps for our lab is 25*C. We stress tested the system with AIDA64 stability test for 20 mins and capture the thermal images then. As we can see from the spot reading, we’re getting around 49*C from the heatsink. For reference, the bare components of the motherboard dispersing heat reads around 54*C on our image. Worth noting is the uniform distribution of heat along the heatsink which means there’s no hotspot in our heatsink on the KINGMAX ZEUS DRAGON.
Conclusion
The KINGMAX ZEUS DRAGON has been announced around November and we’ve yet to confirm pricing with KINGMAX. That said, we’ll focus on the overall product first and decide on the value in an update.
Overall, the KINGMAX ZEUS DRAGON performs as expected offering good timings and good frequency options for those looking for a specific speed to fit their needs. While its going to be really hard to suggest which would be the best amongst the lineup, its easy to recommend that the DDR4-2800 or lower DDR4-2400 would be the sweetspot provided you’re willing and capable of doing a bit of fiddling to overclock the memory basing on the OC result we got. Its worth noting that both DDR4-3000 and DDR4-2800 ZEUS DRAGON both come with DDR4-2666 XMP profiles for a bit of compatibility on systems not capable of running stably on higher clocks.
Build quality is quite good and the thermal dissipation is even in the ZEUS DRAGON. Ultimately, it all boils down to looks and price and while the latter we can’t say for now, the aesthetics on the ZEUS DRAGON are quite fine with us with the dragon styling adding a nice touch to the more subdued black and red color options of the modules.
If you’re looking for non-RGB memory that got good build quality, we present to you the KINGMAX ZEUS DRAGON memory modules.
KINGMAX backs the ZEUS DRAGON memory module with a 5-year warranty. We give it our B2G Recommend Seal!