KLEVV Bolt V DDR5 RAM review — Power to Spare, Priced to Move

KLEVV probably isn’t the first name that pops to the front of your mind when you think about RAM, instead probably thinking of heavyweights like Samsung, Micron, and Kingston. You might, however, think of the second largest manufacturer, Korea-based SK Hynix. If so, you are technically thinking of KLEVV. An offshoot of SK Hynix and Essencore, KLEVV has positioned themselves as an up and coming manufacturer in the RAM space, so I was eager to see what they’d bring to the hyper-competitive DDR5 market. Let’s roll up our sleeves and take a look at the 32GB dual-channel 6800MT/s DDR5 kit and see if it measures up.

Unboxing the Bolt V (KD5AGUA80-68A340H) we see the sleek lines of the low-profile aluminum chassis. At just 34mm, these are perfect for ultra low profile cases, or to tuck underneath air coolers that might be a bit more chunky than usual. The modules we are reviewing today are the top tier – 6800 MT/s, with timings at 34-40-40-80 at 1.35V. The test bench is an MSI MPG Z690 motherboard with an Intel 13900K processor and all of the be quiet! cooling you can ask for. As we do for our storage tests, all of our transfer and synthetic testing is done three times with a clean reboot in between each.

KLEVV has a number of DDR5 modules out now, some with RGB, some with more loose timings, and others with higher speeds. Some of them have onboard ECC (these do) and some do not. The pricing difference between them isn’t significant, so we went with the low-profile ECC modules at 6800 as they represent the best use case, and with the best timings for overclocking. We also wanted a set with XMP support as, to the average person, the idea of tuning individual values and voltages is arcane magic. Of note, these are also AMD EXPO ready, though we don’t have an AMD system to run those tests quite yet.

True to form, plugging in the RAM and enabling XMP Profile 1 enabled the RAM to run at 6800 MT/s with a single click. While we did test overclocking, we found the timings to be about as tight as you can get. Almost any variance off the stated values introduced instability, meaning the KLEVV Bolt V are very much “what you see is what you get”. Let’s get into the measurements.

A quick check with AIDA64 reveals that the timings are exactly as stated, though we can see a lot of additional timings, for those who are more skilled at the overclocking game than I am.

Also inside AIDA64 we can run the built-in benchmarking and cache memory test for this RAM, revealing some fairly impressive numbers. Remember when you look at speeds, you’ll need to double the transfer rate as these are DDR – Double Data Rate.

Seeing the blisteringly fast 103.10 GB/s read speeds, 94 GB/s write, and 96 GB/s copy speeds at just 65 ns of latency puts these into some impressive company. Let’s take a look at where this falls in the charts.

Synthetic tests put the KLEVV Bolt V at nearly the top of the pack, bested only by a memory module at a higher clock rate, and even then, not by much. Timings, the overall quality, and the cooler RAM keeps these running ahead of their counterparts.

Similar to the synthetic tests above, the overall latency is a major contributor to the overall speed. It means less trips to the well, and that’s going to be a better experience overall. How about a few games?

Once again we see that the clock speed on memory is making a fairly significant improvement to framerate. Some sites have reported that memory speeds don’t matter, but we can see a pretty wide delta between manufacturers and transfer speeds. Sure, in some cases it’s maybe 1-3%, but in some cases it can be as high as 10%. That’ll matter quite a bit for the last topic of conversation – price and warranty.

The price for the 6800 MT/s 32GB module set is $119.99 with a limited lifetime warranty – an absolute STEAL at that price. Much like the 900 series NVMe drives we’ve recently reviewed, we’ve not had reason to exercise that warranty. That’s a double-edged sword as it also means we don’t know how well that warranty service works. A lifetime warranty means they stand behind their product, which is encouraging at the very least.

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