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 its 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 with a single ASUS DirectCUII HD 7970 3 GB video card at an overclock 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 Kingston kit offers:


Initial boot-up with XMP enabled was pretty easy, although I had to set secondary timings manually. I have had to do this with many kits already as this is more an artifact of the test platform than of the sticks themselves. There are two XMP profiles available on these sticks: one for 2133 MHz and one for 2400 MHz. Like the Kingston HyperX Beast kit I covered a couple weeks ago, the 2133 MHz profile does come with a lower voltage, which is great for heat reduction and slightly lowered performance, or for CPUs with memory controllers not capable of running the 2400 MHz profile. I'm only going to focus on the 2400 MHz profile for today's testing, since a quick set of benchmarks proved the 2400 MHz profile to be faster than the 2133 MHz profile. Tertiary timings, shown above in the MemTweakIt screenshot, are fairly tight, and I am keen to see their impact on performance.

I have to mention that these sticks run a bit warm if they don't get some airflow, which tends to happen with a lot of DDR3 memory. Very light airflow is more than enough to keep them cool. They are rated to operate at up to a very high 85 °C, so it's not that big of an issue, but they will add some ambient heat to your case if the airflow is restricted.

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.