Thanks for the comments guys, they are much appreciated.
Another excellent memory review Dave. I'm also mystified at the strange 3D bench results but the numbers speak for themselves. I usually default to G.Skill for my RAM needs but I'm tempted to try Kingston with the positive reviews I've read over the past few months.
Your reviews are a pleasure to read. Keep up the good work!
Yeah, those 3D scores are odd, for sure. I do think I know why it works like this, and it might have to do with the fact that if I do a bunch of benchmarking or gaming and remove the sticks right after, one will be cold, and the other warm. With 4 GB sticks, both will be warm. It seems as though only once stick is getting used due to the size of buffer offered, and that provides a single contiguous space that apps can run from, rather than being spread over two DIMMs, making the controller have to access both DIMMs instead of just one.
I do have some other 8 GB DIMMS here now, and am expecting a few more kits to arrive too, so I am going to spend some time looking into this for sure. It is entirely possible that something else, like a Windows update, is what is at fault here, although I do not purposefully install updates.
I test stuff typically a week or two before I get to doing the writing. So there's a bit of a gap between me getting results, and actually examining them. With these weird results showing up, I've taken steps to make sure that I am not leaving such time gaps between testing and writing, and further memory reviews from this point forward will be done with Haswell rather than Ivybridge. I'm just working now on getting my baseline numbers with some of the older kits I have on-hand, including this one, and I'll have another memory review ready for publishing in a few days, hopefully before Monday so it can go live some time next week. I love playing with memory, so I've been very eager to get started on this, let me tell you.