Kingston Fury Renegade DDR5 RGB memory review

Our Verdict

84%

A fabulously fast RGB DDR5 memory kit, but it demands a hefty premium.

This speedy Kingston Fury Renegade DDR5 RGB kit sits at the top of the company’s range and has the looks, frequency, timings and price to match. With a price of $320 (£305) for 32GB (two 16GB modules) running at 6400MHz, this gamer memory kit is hugely expensive, but it’s worth remembering that many first-generation kits cost this much or more when they were first released at the end of last year.

At Custom PC, we’ve been reviewing the latest memory since 2003, and we’ve tested and overclocked hundreds of kits, going right back to the original DDR era. We run both synthetic and application benchmarks to assess performance, and also see how far we can overclock each kit. In addition, we look at any RGB lighting features and assess how good it looks, as well as how well the control software works. For more information, check out our How we test page.

With this Fury Renegade DDR5 RGB kit, you’re getting seriously fast SK Hynix memory chips and some of the lowest timings we’ve seen on a DDR5 memory kit of 32-39-39-80. Despite offering 1200MHz more frequency than many older kits, such as the 5200MHz Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB, the 6400MHz Renegade Fury has similarly tight timings.

The heatsink design is very attractive too, with one black layer sitting on the memory chips and a silver shroud sitting on top of this layer. The heatsinks did a decent job of cooling the memory too, keeping it a couple of degrees cooler than the Kingston Fury Beast RGB kit, and matching the temperature of the ADATA XPG Lancer RGB with its larger heatsinks, despite the extra clock speed.

The RGB lighting is also particularly bright and vivid, easily eclipsing the dimmer ADATA kit here, and while you can use ASRock, Asus, Gigabyte or MSI’s software to control it, there’s also Kingston’s Fury CTRL software, which offers detailed control over colors and effects for each LED on each module. Sadly, there isn’t any extra bonus with the lighting compared with the cheaper Kingston Fury Beast RGB kit – the two memory types look near-identical when installed next to each other.

Kingston Fury Renegade RGB DDR5 performance

As you’d expect, the synthetic AIDA64 Extreme read and write tests had this kit at the top of the graphs, with a 94GB/s read speed, 87GB/s write speed and 63.5nm latency. No other kit got close. It also managed the highest system score in the RealBench test, where its perks seemed to benefit the multi-tasking test the most.

Kingston Fury Renegade RGB DDR5 overclocking

Sadly, it seems that 6400MHz is the limit, though, as we couldn’t overclock the Kingston Fury Renegade RGB any higher. Still, this was enough to match or better the highest overclocked results of the other kits, with the Kingston Fury Beast DDR5 RGB managing 6200MHz, but with looser timings, while the ADATA XPG Lancer RGB did hit 6400MHz, but couldn’t beat the Fury Renegade DDR5 RGB’s performance overall.

Kingston Fury Renegade RGB DDR5 pros and cons

Pros

• Fantastic lighting
• Universal motherboard software compatibility
• Good performance thanks to frequency and tight timings

Cons

• Doesn’t offer significantly more performance for the cash
• Expensive
• Limited other benefits over cheaper kits

Kingston Fury Renegade RGB DDR5 specs

The Kingston Fury Renegade RGB DDR5 specs list is:

Kingston Fury Renegade RGB DDR5 price

Price: Expect to pay $320 / £305.

Kingston Fury Renegade RGB DDR5 review conclusion

If you need the fastest DDR5 memory kit around, and want to splash out on a package that will give you the highest speeds to cater for both Intel and AMD’s next-gen CPUs, then the Kingston Fury Renegade DDR5 RGB is for you. It’s miles faster than older pricey kits, such as the 5200MHz Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB.

However, it’s certainly not cheap at £305, and the real-world gains are minimal over the Kingston Fury Beast DDR5 RGB 6000MHz kit, despite the lower timings and 400MHz clock speed advantage.

It also failed to overclock any higher, but was at least perfectly stable at its stock 6400MHz speed. For most people, the Kingston Fury Beast DDR5 RGB or ADATA XPG Lancer RGB are much better buys, but it’s great to see a recognizable hierarchy forming in what has been a largely disappointing and stock-limited start for DDR5 memory.

For now, at least, Kingston is a front-runner in both the mid-range and high-end sectors of the marker, and with AMD’s Socket AM5 just around the corner, it’s looking like it’s got there just in time.

We’d suggest waiting to see if the Fury Renegade DDR5 RGB’s high spec genuinely gives you an advantage with AMD’s Socket AM5 CPUs before splashing out though.