The ancient Greek god of light knows all too well about well-timed archery shots into the heels of others. Whether these expertises can also be transferred to the performance and illumination of RAM in modern times, however, remains to be seen today. Acer Predator and BIWIN are launching a product series called Apollo, which should live up to the expectation of its divine name and place itself at the top of the market.
To that end, the brand pulls out all the stops right from the start. Specially selected Samsungs 8 Gbit B-Die, currently the best performing DDR4 IC on the market, together with a 10-layer PCB ensures the best possible performance, while the extravagant heatsink design with RGB bombardment also sets new standards in the aesthetics of RAM modules, at least in theory. Today we take a look at 2 of the new Apollo 3600 CL14 kits, one single-ranked and the other dual-ranked, and find out if the series lives up to its name.
Samsung B-Die! B-Die. B-The?
But if we scroll down past the marketing in the data sheet, a few peculiarities stand out at second glance, like for example the SKUs with 2x 32 GB modules. Because to produce 32 GB modules from 8 Gbit ICs would mean that you would have to use 2 rows of memory chips on both sides to get the total capacity. This was tried in the industry once – called Double Capacity DIMMs – but never caught on and wouldn’t fit under the Apollo heatsink anyway, even if it is more in the large size department.
No, Samsung B-Die ICs will most likely not be used by BIWIN for the 32 GB modules, but instead 16 Gbit ICs, such as RevB from Micron. Thus, with two rows, i.e. one per side per module, the mentioned total capacity could be reached much easier and the specified clock rates of DDR4-3200 or DDR4-3600 should be handled by them without any problems.
Equally odd are the SKUs with specified clock speeds of DDR4-5000 and timings 19-26-26-46. Of course B-Die would be able to keep these timings at speed without any problems, but it needs a memory controller that can keep up with it. And this is where I’m sceptical, because even a highly selected Intel Rocket Lake or AMD Cezanne CPU will reach its limits here.
apollo_specs
It would be much easier to use e.g. SK Hynix DJR at such clock rates, on the basis of which there are already various kits from other manufacturers with exactly identical XMP specifications on the market. Coincidence? I generally welcome the fact that Acer Predator advertises the ICs used in their flagship product and makes it transparent for customers which engine is under the hood of the metaphorical supercar. But this information, if it is given, should be exact for all SKUs.
Ideally I would wish that for each SKU in a further column of the data sheet also simply the used memory IC is indicated, be it B-Die, RevB, DJR etc. or possibly also several IC types if these could be varied depending upon availability within the production of a SKU, which is quite common with looser XMP profiles. Now, whether or not all of the SKUs are Samsung B-Die ICs, I definitely can’t say at this time, as we don’t have any of the questionable SKUs in today’s test. But maybe something will come up on this soon.
But enough of the fine details of the small print, in the end these are only small shortcomings, especially if the product is coherent and the performance fits. So let’s first look at the packaging, design and first impression of the modules.
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