You just bought the fastest (and most expensive) desktop platform on the planet. Which company's memory will you use to populate Intel's quad-channel controller? We tested four purportedly high-end kits in order to find out which set is the best.

Anyone willing to drop one thousand dollars on a CPU probably wants to match it up to the best possible memory kit, especially armed with the knowledge that Intel’s new quad-channel memory controller is located within that CPU. How are we to know which kit is the best, though?

We left it up to manufacturers to decide which quad-channel kit they thought would be best, making it clear that our judgement would be balanced between overclocking, minimum latencies, and capacity.

With such general terms for qualification, we ended up with one 8 GB kit (made up of four 2 GB modules) and three 16 GB sets (naturally composed of 4 GB modules), rated at DDR3-2400 or DDR3-2133, and with extremely similar timings

We're going to go ahead and start testing on our end. In the meantime, check out each kits details on the next few pages. We promise that by the time you're finished reading, the results will be ready for you!