PNY XLR8 Gaming DDR4 Ram review: "A great option with fast speeds and beautiful RGB"

If you're thinking about upgrading the memory of your machine then you're likely looking at RAM options. The XLR8 Gaming 3600MHz should be on your radar. This RAM for gaming, powered by PNY, comes in at just $99.99/£99.99 for 16GB (2x8GB). 

These are two sticks of RGB dual channel DDR4 which are compatible with all speeds below 3600MHz. The biggest name in the RGB RAM industry right now is probably Corsair Vengeance and it's worth noting that the XLR8 sticks actually cost more than the Vengeance in the UK, but are $30 cheaper in the US. However, you are getting slightly faster speeds at 3600MHz, as opposed to 3200MHz. 

Design and Features

Covering the design of RAM sticks can be slightly difficult as they are usually quite bland and boring but the RGB element on these sticks really elevate them. You can control the lighting with multiple brand-specific motherboard software, including MSI, ASROCK, ASUS, and FUSION. The colors are bright and vibrant; I left them on the default color option because it matched the wave of the fans in my PC by luck which was great. 

Other than RGB the rest of the stick has a very standard RAM design. They are just plain black with XLR8 branding on them, but obviously, you can barely see this underneath the lighting. 

Now onto the features. You get speeds of up to 3600MHz, but you'll also find compatibility with 3200MHz, 3000MHz, 2933MHz, 2800MHz, 2666MHz, 2400MHz, and 2133MHz machines. So no matter what your needs are this will work for you.

Elsewhere, the CAS latency is 18, which is slightly higher than the RAM average of 16. But this is something so minimal, you likely wouldn't notice.

Performance

I replaced my current RAM with this and noticed a difference pretty quickly. My original sticks were just standard DDR4 that I picked up secondhand, so these were certainly an upgrade. 

I found my machine functioning slightly faster and it was a nice quality-of-life change, especially when having multiple programs open at once. Usually, when I have a game open, it takes a while for me to boot something else, such as OBS or even Discord. Now things opened ever so slightly faster and reacted snappier. 

You're able to overclock this RAM, which of course requires you to enable XMP in your PC's bios. This is done with ease and if you haven't done this before it's easy to figure out, so don't worry. 

One aspect I disliked slightly when using the XLR8 RAM actually came down to the design. The RGB lights had nice diffusers on them in order to disperse the lights but I felt like this wasn't done effectively. As you can see in the pictures below, you can notice exactly where the lights emit from. But this wasn't that big of a deal to me.  

Should you buy the XLR8 DDR4 RAM?

Honestly, if you have RAM that works then I wouldn't recommend upgrading to faster speeds before you upgrade how much RAM you have. It's better to have 32GB of slower memory than 16GB of faster memory.

However, if you're only just making the switch to DDR4 (no shame, I only swapped in April this year), then this is a great option with fast speeds and beautiful RGB. For just under $100 / £100, this is pretty solid. 

How we tested the XLR8 PNY DDR4 RAM

I replaced the RAM in my current machine with the XLR8 PNY DDR4 RAM and monitored how my PC held up in comparison to the sticks I had beforehand. I ran multiple programmes at once to see how they coped. I also played games of different intensities to see how the RAM held up. 

You can read more on how we test gaming tech in our full 12DOVE Hardware Policy.

If you're hoping to build yourself a rig then be sure to check out our best CPU for gaming and best SSD for gaming. You can also pick up a prebuilt machine from our best gaming PC list if you don't want the hassle of building one yourself.