Memory Performance: 16GB DDR3-1333 to DDR3-2400 on Ivy Bridge IGP with G.Skill
by Ian Cutress on October 18, 2012 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Memory
- G.Skill
- Ivy Bridge
- DDR3
Market Positioning
Over recent years the price of DDR3 memory kits has hit record lows quarter on quarter. This means that profit margins for companies are also getting smaller and smaller – it becomes hard to differentiate yourself as a product line on price alone. This is the reason why a lot of the kits we have looked at today are designed to be visually eye catching – having either colored heatsinks, detachable heatsinks or shaped designs.
The pricing for each of the kits are as follows:
$75: Ares DDR3-1333 9-9-9 4x4 GB
$80: RipjawsX DDR3-1600 9-9-9 4x4 GB
$95: Sniper DDR3-1866 9-10-9 4x4 GB
$130: RipjawsZ DDR3-2133 9-11-10 4x4 GB
$145: TridentX DDR3-2400 10-12-12 4x4 GB
The margin between the 1333 MHz and 1600 MHz kits is $5, and as such would only be differentiated between tight budget constraints, bulk sales or aesthetic looks. The jump up to 1866 MHz is slightly more, but going up to DDR3-2133 and beyond is a significant jump in price, indicative of the binning process required for these higher end modules. The testing in this review will show if the leap up to DDR3-2133 memory is proportionally a good idea.
Test Bed
| Test Bed | |
| Processor |
i7-3770K @ 4.4 GHz 4 Cores / 8 Threads |
| Motherboard | ASUS P8Z77-V Premium |
| Memory |
G.Skill 1333 MHz 9-9-9-24 1.5V 4x4GB Kit G.Skill 1600 MHz 9-9-9-24 1.5V 4x4GB Kit G.Skill 1866 MHz 9-10-9-28 1.5V 4x4GB Kit G.Skill 2133 MHz 9-11-10-28 1.65V 4x4GB Kit G.Skill 2400 MHz 10-12-12-31 1.65V 4x4GB Kit |
| CPU Cooler | Intel Stock Cooler |
| Graphics Cards |
Intel HD4000 ECS GTX580 |
| Power Supply | Rosewill SilentNight 500W Platinum |
| Storage | OCZ Vertex3 240GB |
| SATA 6Gbps to USB 3.0 | Thermaltake BlacX 5G Docking Station |
| Thunderbolt Device | Lacie Little Big Disk 240GB |
| Test Bench | Coolermaster Test Bed |
| Operating System | Windows 7 x64 Ultimate |
Many thanks to...
We must thank the following companies for kindly donating hardware for our test bed:
OCZ for donating the USB testing SSD
G.Skill for donating our memory kits
ASUS for donating the IO testing kit
ECS for donating NVIDIA GPUs
Rosewill for donating the Power Supply
I would like to extend thanks for Rosewill, as this is the first review we have used their new SilentNight 500W Platinum power supply. I first saw this bit of kit at Computex – a silent power supply capable of 500W and Platinum certified sounds like a great bit of kit and it was flawless during out testing. When I received the power supply I made an unboxing video before it went on sale:
It currently retails for $180 on Newegg.
ASUS MemTweakIt
With our overview of the ASUS Republic of Gamers range of products, one piece of software caught my eye while I was testing. The ASUS MemTweakIt allows for almost complete control of the memory subtimings while in the OS, such that users can optimize their settings for memory reads, memory writes, or for pushing the boundaries. The upshot of this software in our context is that it takes all the sub-timings and settings and condenses them into a score. As the memory kits we test contain XMP profiles, these profiles determine a large majority of the sub-timings on the kit and how aggressive a memory manufacturer is. We should see this represented in our MemTweakIt score.
As we do not know the formula by which ASUS calculates this value, it has to be taken with a pinch of salt. It could be weighted in favor of one of the settings versus the other. Normally I would not put such an non-descript benchmark as part of our testing suite, but the MemTweakIt software does give us one descriptor – it gives us a theoretical rate of improvement across the range of kits we test, and allows us to order them in the way they should perform. With this being said, the results for our kits are as follows:
The rise in MemTweakIt score does not follow the price increases – for an almost doubling of the cost of the memory kit, we only see a 17.76% rise in the score. What this score means, we will see in due course.
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just4U - Saturday, October 20, 2012 - link
Peaunut we are not talking 300-500 bucks here.. this is a 20-30 dollar premium which is nothing in comparison to what ram used to cost and how much more premium ram was as well.If your on a tight budget get 8Gigs of regular ram which is twice the amount of ram you likely need anyway.
Tech-Curious - Monday, November 5, 2012 - link
Thing is, these tests are for integrated graphics, unless I'm misreading something (AFAICT, the discrete card was only used for PhysX support; if I misread there then I apologize).Off the top of my head, there are basically three scenarios in which you're likely to want an IGP:
1) You're building an HTPC, in which case you prioritize (lack of) noise and (lack of) heat over graphics' power. If all you want to run are movies, then the IGP should be adequate regardless of the speed of your memory -- and if you want to play games, no amount of memory is going to turn an Intel IGP into an adequate performer on your average TV set these days. (Better to grab an AMD APU or just give up the ghost and grab a moderate-performance GPU.)
2) You're looking to run a laptop. But the memory reviewed in this article doesn't apply to laptops anyway.
3) You're on a tight budget.
So at best, we're talking about a fraction of a sliver of a tiny niche in the market, when we discuss the people who might be interested in wringing every last ounce of performance out of an IGP by installing high-priced desktop memory. Sure, the difference in absolute cost between the cheapest and the most expensive RAM here isn't going to make or break most people -- but people generally don't like to incur unnecessary costs either.
And people who are on a budget? They can save $80, just based on the numbers in the article, without making any significant performance sacrifice. That's real money, computer-component-wise.
tynopik - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
"I remember buying my first memory kit ever. It was a 4GB kit"makes you feel old
my first was 8MB
DanNeely - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
My first computer only had 16k.Mitch101 - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
VIC-203583 bytes free
jamyryals - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
wow :)just4U - Saturday, October 20, 2012 - link
The first computer i bough was a tandy 1000. I got them to put in 4 megs of ram.. at 50 bucks per meg.GotThumbs - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
Same here.I had purchased a used AT Intel 486DX 33Mhz powered system and upgraded it to 16mb around 1989. Overclocking it was done using jumpers on the motherboard. Heck, in HS I was a student assistant my senior year and recorded everyone's grades on a cassette tape drive using a Tandy (TS-80 I believe). It blows my mind thinking about how things have changed. There's more power/ram in a Raspberry PI than my first computer.
Best wishes for computing in the next ~30 years.
andrewaggb - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
Agreed, my first computer I owned personally was a 486 slc 33 (cyrix....) and I had a couple 1mb memory sticks, can't remember if those were called sims or something else. We had an apple 2+, trs 80, commodore 64, and ibm pc jr in the early-mid 80's but those were my dads :-), and some 286 that I can't remember the brand of.Just thinking about the e6400 as a first pc amuses me :-), that's still usable, and actually is when most of the computer fun started to die in my books. My current pc's are running phenom II 965, i5 2500k, i7 620m, i5 750, i7 720qm and I just have little motivation to upgrade anything ever.
Haswell is the first chip in a long time that I'm excited about. Everything else has been meh. And AMD... I had an amd 486-120,K6-200,K6-2 300,athlon xp 1800,2500, athlon 64 3200, athlon 64 x2 4800, 5600, phenom II 945,phenom x3, and my current 965 and a c-50 e netbook. man hard to believe all the computers I've had :-) Anyways, amd has nothing I want anymore, except cheap multicore cpus for running x264 all day.
IanCutress - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
E6400 wasn't the first PC... just the first processor I actually bought memory for. The rest were pre-built or hand-me-downs. :) I actually just took the same motherboard/chip out of my brother's computer (he has had it for a few years, with that memory) and bumped him up to Sandy Bridge. I'm still 27, and the E6400 system was new for me when I was around 21 or so. Since then I've got a Masters and a PhD - time flies when you're having fun!Ian