Kingston LoVo: Power saving 1.25V DDR3 RAM

Kingston LoVo: Power saving 1.25V DDR3

Manufacturer: Kingston

It's not often we feature memory here on bit-tech, but with our recent investigation of energy efficiency in computer hardware, we discovered that lowering the voltage of DDR3 can surprisingly reduce the power use of the CPU-memory subsystem quite significantly.

Kingston recently dropped by Dennis HQ with its latest 'LoVo' memory that will run at anything down to 1.25V at 1,333MHz, or even 1,866MHz at 1.35V with its built-in XMP profile. This immediately piqued our interest, like the curious cats we are, because it posed an extended metric to our previous memory voltage/power use tests: how does 1.25V (and less) compare to our previous results at 1.65V, 1.5V and 1.35V?

With that in mind, we whipped out our test hardware from the previous energy efficiency feature and dropped in the Kingston kit for a quick bout of LoVo lovin'.


The actual LoVo kit has, for the first time, changed Kingston's standard ocean-blue heatspreaders, in favour of new green overalls. In the most basic sense, this actually looks better because now Kingston is shipping its green PCB with green heatsinks. The new colours make for a pleasant change to the usual aggressive black and red colour schemes that litter the market. Thankfully this is also where Kingston stops ramming the ever increasing eco-friendly bandwagon down our throats. We really like the LoVo branding, as it makes clear what the product is and delivers without muddying the message with 'eco-this', 'green-that' or 'planet saving-whatever'. It's just low-voltage memory, hence LoVo.