Memory Performance Results

Test System

I am using a fairly decent CPU overclock for all testing because greater CPU overlocks allow for greater memory performance increases to be properly utilized. I have picked 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; it is rated at 11-11-11-28-1T. The second kit is a much older high-performance kit that was meant to be used with P55 chipsets but missed out on full support with a SandyBridge CPU, since those CPUs didn't support the Patriot kit's 2000 MHz XMP speed with 9-10-9-27-3T timings natively. IvyBridge differs from SandyBridge in many ways, but one of the most important changes for gamers and overclockers is the addition of many more memory dividers, such as 2000 MHz, which makes this old kit useful again with IvyBridge. It wasn't matched to any of SandyBridge's default multipliers. I have spent several months testing these kits with various boards and both have worked great. I also test using a single ASUS DirectCUII HD 7970 3 GB video card at an overclocked speed of 1050 MHz for the core and 1500 MHz for the memory. This helps eliminate any sort of GPU bottleneck that might be 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. Let's take a look at what performance increases the G.Skill kit offers:


Booting up the DIMMs on my ASUS Maximus V Extreme took place without a hitch, but the board ignored SPD timings for the XMP profile, with secondary timings. This is the case with any kit I install into this board, so I manually adjust settings to match what I find in the kit's XMP profile, which resulted in 2666 MHz with a 1.65V voltage setting. I did notice that these DIMMs seem to get 1.65V with just the JEDEC profile enabled while most other DIMMS will boot with 1.5V; or 1.35V for low-powered DIMMs like the Samsung sticks I use. Above, you can see a screenshot of MemTweakIt: a tool that is included with the ASUS Maximus V Extreme. This tool shows the timings that are in use, and you'll see that secondary timings are quite tight in comparison to the Corsair kit I reviewed last.

There is not much else for me to say at this point. I booted into my pre-installed OS and managed to complete all testing without much fanfare - as expected. On the next couple of pages, you'll find both system-oriented and 3D-oriented benchmark results for the kits. As is now the norm for me, I'll let the numbers do the talking.