Kingston Factory Tour

Kingston Factory Tour

We recently were lucky enough to get invited to a Kingston Factory tour in California and we thought that it was rather interesting and would like to share some of the photos and impressions we got while on the tour. Now Kingston has factories all over the globe but this one in California is for the manufacturing and testing of ram so it's a little more than just chip building machines. They also do compatibility testing across a wide variety of platforms at the plant so there's actually to much hardware to show you completely.

These type things usually always start off at a Hotel with a meeting, those can be a little lengthy and we'll spare you most of that but there were a few interesting things to share from the meeting.

Low and behold one of the speakers at the meeting was none other than Fugger who often works with Gigabyte and Kingston at these types of presentations.

Fugger brought out the big guns at this presentation and this is the dual compressor Phase Change unit he was using while OCing the Kingston HyperX he had mounted to the board.

Here's the P55A-UD6 board he was using to OC the 2GHx kit of HyperX he was using. At the time the P55A-UD6 was unreleased so we were watching him OC the Ram on a virgin platform and he did pretty good for a rookie and got the kit up to around 2400MHz.

Ever wonder what those cryptic Kingston ram stickers mean?

 The First letters are the Rams Designator, here it's KHX for HyperX, the next 4 numbers are the speed, the next two digits are the Cas Timings of the kit. The A in the center is the revision of the ram kit in this case revision 2 if it's blank it's revision 1. The D3 lets you know it's DDR3 and the T1 is for the heatspreader type, in this case T1 Tall (New) Heatspreader. The K3 tells you the pieces in the kit in this case 3 for a triple channel kit. The 6G is the density of the kit, this one is a 6GB kit and the last letter tells you the platform it's designed for as far as available profiles.

Sitting around the room were nice hardware displays to drool over. The tall black case had a 4xRaid0 enterprise class SSD array setup and we saw speeds up to 1GB/s from that specific array in selected tests. Just about any test we ran (yes we had hands on) we got speeds ranging from 600MB/s to 900MB/s and we have to tell you it was one sweet setup.

The next rig in the lineup was a Dual SSD rig in a Thermaltake Lan chassis and it was pushing a couple of V series drives in Raid0 which is a lot more affordable than the high end 4xRaid0 (enterprise class) array in the last picture. Just the drives in the last rig would set you back in the neighborhood of $2000. This setup here isn't nearly as fast but with a couple of 40GB Kingston SSD's (Intel controller) you could setup a boot drive with 80GB of storage in 2XRaid0 for the neighborhood of $230 and run in the 230MB/s range for read speeds.

Kingston and Gigabyte have been working closely together to make a great partnership of Gigabyte boards and Kingston ram and we have to tell you that if your going onto a Gigabyte board it might be compatible with a lot of models of ram but with this partnership you'd be silly passing up a kit of HyperX to slap on the Gigabyte board because they run together like a dream. In General HyperX runs like a dream but when the board vendor and Ram vendor partner up you know that you'll get excellent performance and compatibility.

Most of the boards we saw were early P55 release boards (October meeting) so the P55A-USXX boards weren't out yet.

Then last in line on that table is the Gigabyte GA-P55-UD6 and we've reviewed the P55-UD6 and P55A-UD6 and it's hard to go wrong with those boards if you happen to be a hardcore performance demanding enthusiast. The 2oz copper PCB helps keep the entire board cool and the 24 phase power with advanced BIOS makes OCing a dream.

When we first walked in the door we thought we had crashed a Gigabyte meeting but then we noticed every machine running Kingston ram and the deer in the oncoming headlights look left our eyes.

We were especially interested in the P55A-UD6 board, we got with Gigabyte at the meeting and insured we would be in on first round testing on the Sata 3 and USB 3.0 board. Turns out we were a little late out of the gate with the 22 page review but unlike a lot of sites we did full Sata 3 and USB 3.0 testing in the boards review.

After an exhausting meeting (and hands on hardware session) we retreated to a really nice resturant and enjoyed the company of the Kingston and Gigabyte gang over dinner. We might get in trouble for telling you this but the Kingston and Gigabyte gang aren't at all like what most people would imagine. They are polite and professional which you would expect but they are also very friendly down to earth people that we enjoyed meeting and eating with.

We'll spare you and us the photos of dinner because that's when everyone lets their guard down and just enjoys the company.