OCZ shocked the market with their water-cooled FlexXLC memory and while they were impressive these high performance modules cost a small fortune. Therefore OCZ created the Reaper HPC series featuring a unique passively cooled heatsink. Today we test drive the 2GB PC2-8500 kit which is designed to operate at 1066MHz with relaxed CAS5-5-5-15 timings. However, we found these modules to be capable of much more...

Often high speed memory such as the OCZ DDR2 PC2-8500 Reaper HPC comes with absurd price tags and it is not uncommon to find 2GB kits retaining for $400 US or more. Given that your typical value type DDR2 memory costs just $150 US, it is hard to imagine spending almost three times this dollar amount for the same capacity memory. It is even harder to justify the cost of high-speed memory when it’s not all that much faster and with chipsets such as the nForce 6 series that do not require high-speed memory for overclocking, it becomes even harder.