If you’re reading this article, you’re probably pretty familiar with Kingston Technology and what they do. After all, we’ve reviewed quite a bit of Kingston products over the years.
Two years ago, we made a trip to Kingston headquarters in Fountain Valley, California where some of Kingston’s finest employees took us on a grand tour of their USA manufacturing operations, giving us a good idea as to why Kingston is the top 3rd party memory manufacturer in the world.
Recently, Kingston invited us back to their offices to have a look at their new HyperX division dedicated to making HyperX the premier brand for gamers and hardware enthusiasts.
Here we have the employee “cubicles”. Here’s where all the procurement, sales, etc. happen for Kingston’s HyperX division. While Kingston’s HyperX DRAM and HyperX SSD products are still managed by Kingston, the HyperX division is in charge of expanding future HyperX product lines such as Kingston’s latest HyperX Cloud gaming headset.
As HyperX is geared heavily towards PC enthusiasts, Kingston also had an overclocking station in-house where they invite overclockers to break world records using their memory products. Here we have some LN2 overclocking using Kingston’s HyperX Predator memory along with Gigabyte’s recently introduced Z97X-SOC Force.
Speaking of overclocking, famous Gigabyte overclockers “HiCookie” and “Sofos1990” recently achieved the world record for memory overclocking by pushing a 4GB HyperX Predator 2,933MHz module to 4,620MHz.
While overclocking is huge to the HyperX brand, pro gaming is also just as important to the HyperX brand. Inside Kingston’s HyperX offices is a fully operational tournament room where 5v5 gaming tournaments can be held. Kingston also has a separate room for commentators with full support for Twitch.tv livestreaming. Kingston now sponsors 19 top pro gaming teams such as Evil Geniuses, Natus Vincere, SK-Gaming, Team Dignitas, etc.
Uhh… what’s this? Wii gaming? In a HyperX conference room? Blasphemy!
Of course, there’s also all the HyperX products on display. I should probably be careful about calling things Kingston HyperX as Kingston is currently trying to phase out the Kingston HyperX branding in favor of just HyperX. This is why some of the newer products such as the HyperX FURY SSD, HyperX FURY DDR3, HyperX Cloud, etc. no longer carry the Kingston name, or if they do the Kingston branding is very modest.
Here’s where it’s really cool. Inside the HyperX division is also a fully stocked validation room. Kingston’s in-house technical applications wizards get the awesome job of pushing Kingston products to the limits and tweaking them to ensure they meet the level of quality HyperX users demand.
Unlike many manufacturers who buy products from ODMs and sell it simply to make a profit, Kingston takes the extra step no matter if it’s DRAM, SSDs, or even headsets to fully vet the product to ensure it meets HyperX quality. The new HyperX Cloud gaming headset for example is tested here using both an artificial ear as well as an artificial mouth. This way both the headphones as well as the microphone can be tuned to Kingston’s exact specifications. Kingston will soon be taking this testing even further with a dedicated anechoic chamber.
Keen observers will notice that the HyperX Cloud is actually based off the design for the Qpad QH-90, but the headphones and microphones are tuned to HyperX’s specific specifications.
While checking out the HyperX Cloud gaming headset tuning process, we also got a chance to do some listening tests. Listening to the live version of Hotel California by The Eagles, we were very impressed both with the clarity and the level of detail presented by the headset despite the audio being streamed off YouTube and all the background noise outside. Considering its sub-$80 street price, it’s really quite good. Hopefully we’ll be getting our review units in soon.
As always, thanks for the tour Kingston! Hopefully the boss doesn’t find out I spent some time chillin’ in his $2 million car!!!
