Team Group T-Force Dark Zα 3600MHz DDR4 AMD Gaming RAM Review: Black Beauty
We have reviewed many Team Group RAM kits, all of which were great and the Dark Zα 3600MHz DDR4 gaming kit (for AMD) certainly continues that trend! Although the Dark Zα’s design isn’t as flashy as the T-Force Excalibur or T-Force Night Hawk, it is still great looking, and it can fit a multitude of different build themes.
The new x570 chipset has become quite appealing due to its innovations and performance. However, acquiring memory for your new AMD build can be quite daunting. Most memory kits on the market are primarily designed for Intel-based systems. Therefore, this can cause some problems when they are paired with AMD CPUs, primarily when it comes to XMP profiles. However, Team Group has made picking out a new memory kit for your new AMD system much easier since the Dark Zα kit has been specifically designed for x570 AMD systems.
The Dark Zα comes in two capacities, 16GB (2x8GB) and 32GB (2x16GB), each offering 3 speeds, 3200MHz, 3600MHz, and 4000MHz. In this review, we will focus on the 16GB 3600MHz kit.
Unboxing and Initial Impressions
The Dark Zα arrives in minimalistic plastic packaging. An informational card is included in the packaging displaying some information about the T-Force lineup of products and basic information about the RAM itself.
After removing the DIMMs from the packaging, we can clearly feel the build quality. Team Group went with a glossy black finish and aggressive fins. These fins not only add to the aggressive look, but they are also designed to use computer case airflow to cool the memory modules. The heatsink feels thin and light in your hands.
The heatsink measures 43.5(H) x 141(L) x 8.3(W) mm, which is a good size that should clear most coolers, but we recommend you double check before purchasing. The weight of a single DIMM is 40 grams.
Performance & XMP
The CAS latency for the 16GB 3600MHz kit is 18-22-22-42 and the voltage is 1.35.
As we stated earlier, many XMP profiles in the market will simply not work with Ryzen 3000 series and x570 motherboards. But we are happy to say that the DARK Zα Kit worked as advertised!
We had no trouble reaching the advertised 3600MHz speeds when using the XMP profile in our AMD system running a 3700x CPU. As with our previous Team Group memory kits, we did not experience any stability issues with XMP enabled.
Conclusion
Overall, we are pleasantly surprised with Team Group’s T-Force Dark Zα, especially with its affordable price of $84.99. The T-Force Dark Zα is not as flashy as other Team Group offerings, but it gets the job done. We highly recommend the T-Force Dark Zα to anyone looking for cheap yet fast RAM for their AMD Ryzen 3000 system.