Light up your desktop's insides with Corsair's colorful new Vengeance RGB memory kits

Corsair began selling its five new Vengeance RGB DDR4 memory kits, which range in price between $150 and $600, on March 21. As the name implies, these high-performance DDR4 memory sticks sport a “precision-engineered” light bar across the top of the heat spreader to light up the innards of your desktop with various colors and effects. They can even change color based on system temperatures.

Here are the specs and pricing of all five kits:

Each Vengeance RGB memory stick consists of a custom performance printed circuit board, hand-screened integrated circuits, and a built-in heat spreader for cool, superior performance no matter the load. The XMP 2.0 support means that each chip can safely switch between preconfigured, tested Intel XMP profiles for safe overclocking.

“Vengeance RGB’s Corsair Link software control is compatible with a wide range of Intel DDR4 platforms, from dual-channel Z270 and Z170 to quad-channel X99, with more boards adding compatibility every week and AMD Ryzen support planned soon,” the company said.

Corsair added that each Vengeance RGB stick packs “specifically designed” lighting circuitry, meaning users won’t see a memory performance decrease with the lighting enabled. And through the Corsair Link tool, users can synchronize the memory’s lighting and effects with other compatible Corsair products installed in the system. The lighting effects include Static, Rainbow, Breathing, and Color Shift.

According to Corsair, the new Vengeance RGB memory sticks are compatible with third-party motherboard software RGB control. The first motherboard maker to embrace Corsair’s colorful new memory is Gigabyte, which now supports Vengeance RGB lighting in its RGB Fusion app. Other motherboard partners will add support for the Vengeance RGB sticks “soon.”

As a refresher, CAS latency is the time between the memory controller’s initial command to the availability of stored data on the output pins. Naturally, the smaller the number, the faster the memory performance per clock cycle. The four-digit latency numbers actually represent four parameters: CAS latency, Row Address to Column Address Delay, Row Percentage Time, and Row Active Time.

Thus, for an additional $5, customers get less latency and higher memory speeds using the CMR16GX4M2C3000C15 kit than they would with the CMR16GX4M2A2666C16 kit. But the performance increase also increases the power draw, upping the usage to 1.35 volts from 1.2 volts.