You feel like you just bought the fastest (and most expensive) Server platform on the planet. Which company’s memory will you use to populate your server? We tested 2 purportedly high-end kits in order to find out which set is the best.

Anyone willing to drop a couple thousand dollars on a Server probably wants to match it up to the best possible memory kit. How are we to know which kit is the best, though?

We left it up to manufacturers to decide which 16GB kit they thought would be best, making it clear that our judgment would be balanced between Performance, Pricing, and Latencies.

With such terms for qualification, we ended up with one EDGE 16 GB kit (made up of one 16GB module) and a Crucial 16 GB kit kit (made up of one 16GB module), rated at DDR3-1600, and with extremely similar specs.

Testing was done by testing the memory in different types of server setups and environments. Below is a breakdown.

– Web Server – Crucial: Pass EDGE: Pass

– File Server – Crucial: Pass EDGE: Pass

– PBX System at full 33 person Call Center – Crucial: Pass EDGE: Pass ( During this test Edge seemed to run into less issues. But both ran fairly well in this environment) Asterisk server.

– Render Farm Environment –  Crucial: Pass EDGE: Pass (Edge out performed Crucial in this area by 7% would be awesome to test with a much larger load and maxing out the memory with 24 of these totaling 384GB) It was surprising to see a render time difference that was that big with 2 identical spec units.

We like to thank the following partners for allowing us to run our server in their facilities to run our test:

– Champion Broadband

– Declaration Pictures

– D3 Reaction Media

– Del Norte High School

In some environments server test bed was changed with facility servers. In 2 cases we ran into compatibility issues with both the edge module and the Crucial module on the Dell R610. Crucial ran but at a locked speed way below spec.

We’re going to go ahead and start testing,  starting with The least-expensive of this comparison’s premium RAM, EDGE’s PE232160 still packs a punch of DDR3-1600 rating and a full 16 GB capacity.

We’re not certain how EDGE achieved this pricing feat while including a heat spreader than its 16 GB competitors. But we’re happy to see that this kit is still as easy to configure as those more-expensive parts.

Crucial rushed its 16 GB kit over to us, the unfortunate result is that the first unit ended up being DOA. Our motherboard detects and configures Crucial’s DDR3-1333 C11 automatically. This, of course, is bootable at a motherboard’s default 1.50 V.

After a series of test and a few drinks…lol. EDGE wins our ROUND UP, and that should be enough to convince admins to take the plunge. Of course, in the real-world, you have to remember that depending on your server requirements 16GB may not be enough. Specially, if building a render farm where high levels of memory are a must.

So, how do we define superiority in a market where people are willing to pay 100% more to get 10% better performance? Certainly we can’t make a decision based on price alone.

After all, the second-fastest Crucial kit does pack a punch but depending on application the overall results point to EDGE providing a 17% performance lead if set up in a 64GB Configuration.