Memory Performance Results

I am using a fairly decent CPU overclock for all testing because greater CPU overlocks allow greater memory performance increases to be properly utilized. I have selected many different benchmarks that show these differences, but not all workloads are going to see the same gains as these hand-picked benchmarks show. To show the increases, I started with two different memory kits, one from Samsung, and one from Patriot. The Samsung kit is a 1600 MHz kit that features normal JEDEC timings for that speed, rated at 11-11-11-28-1T. The second kit is a much older high-performance kit that was intended to be used with P55 chipsets, but missed out on full support with a SandBridge CPU since those CPUs didn't natively support Patriot kit's 2000 MHz XMP speed with 9-11-9-27-3T timings. IvyBridge differs from SandyBridge in many ways, but one of the most important changes to gamers and overclockers is the addition of many more memory dividers, such as 2000 MHz, which makes this old kit useful. I have spent several months testing these kits with various boards and both have worked great. I also test using two Gigabyte Windforce HD7950 3 GB video cards that run in Crossfire mode at their default speeds of 900 MHz for the core, and 1250 MHz for the memory. This helps eliminate any sort of GPU bottleneck that might have been introduced while, at the same time, showing to be sensitive to memory performance changes. Whether this is due to extra CPU or memory load is not known, or relevant. Over the next several weeks I'll be covering many different memory kits, the first of which was posted last week. While there are only a few results now, you can expect that to change soon! Let's take a look at what performance increases the Corsair kit offers:

AIDA64 Performance

Of course, with the same timings as the G.SKill kit I tested last week, but a higher default speed, the Corsair kit performs well here. Read performance increased a bit over 1500 MB/s, while latency dropped by 2.4 ns, as shown below.


Copy performance did decrease a little bit compared to the G.Skill kit, most likely an artifact of IC density, since the G.Skill kit used single-sided 4 GB sticks.

SiSoft Sandra Performance

SiSoft Sandra provides an interesting perspective over AIDA64, showing that different workloads will experience different results. Here, results show that the Corsair sticks have less bandwidth overall compared to the G.Skill kit, but the other two tests clearly show a performance increase.

SuperPi

SuperPi has always been quite sensitive to changes in memory performance, and we still see the same is true with IvyBridge, although there are only mere seconds between each result. The Corsair kit really impressed me here, shaving a bit over seven and a half seconds off the total time needed to complete the benchmark.

WinRAR

Winrar is also fairly sensitive to memory performance changes, due to the type of workload provided by compressing and decompressing data. Again, the Corsair kit showed quite substantial gains over the other kits, which made me run the test more than the usual 5 times! This kit really is fast.

wPrime

wPrime is much more focused on straight CPU performance, yet memory plays its role as well. Here the gains provided by the Corsair kit are very small, but they are still there for sure.