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
Synthetic testing has a way of elevating what may be a minor difference between hardware into a larger-than-life comparison, despite the effect on the usage of the system being near minimal. There are several benchmarks which straddle the line between synthetic and real world (such as Cinebench and SPECviewperf) which we include here, plus a couple which users at home can use to compare their memory settings.
SPECviewperf
The mix of real-world and synthetic benchmarks does not get more complex than SPECviewperf – a benchmarking tool designed to test various capabilities in several modern 3D renders. Each of these rendering programs come with their own coding practices, and as such can either be memory bound, CPU bound or GPU bound. In our testing, we use the standard benchmark on the IGP and report the results for comparison.
Each of these tools uses different methods in order to compute and display information. Some of these are highly optimized to be less taxing on the system, and some are optimized to use less memory. All the tests benefit in some way moving from DDR3-1333 to DDR3-2400, although some as little as 2%. The biggest gain was using Maya where a 22% increase was observed.
Cinebench x64
A long time favourite of synthetic benchmarkers the world over is the use of Cinebench, software designed to test the real-world application of rendering software via the CPU or GPU. In this circumstance we test the CPU single core and multi-core performance, as well as the GPU performance using a single GTX 580 at x16 PCIe 2.0 bandwidth. Any serial factors have to be processed through the CPU, and as such any memory access will either slow or speed up the benchmark.
In terms of CPU performance in Cinebench, the boost from faster memory is almost negligible; moving from DDR3-1333 to DDR3-2133 gives the best boost of about 1.5%.
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vegemeister - Friday, October 19, 2012 - link
Most of the (still tiny) difference that appeared in the x264 benchmark was in the first pass. Two pass encodes really only make sense when you're trying to fit a single video onto a single storage device. That's an extremely uncommon use case these days, for everyone but the people mastering blu-rays.jonyah - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
"I remember buying my first memory kit ever. It was a 4GB kit of OCZ DDR2 for my brand new E6400 system, and at the time I paid ~$240, sometime back in 2005."I remember buying my first kit too. It was an upgrade from the 2MB I had to 6MB (yes MB, not GB), and that 6MB cost me $200 as well, this was back in 1995. Ten years and we had a 1000x improvement in size and who knows how much in speed.
rchris - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
Well, dang it! All these "I remember..." comments have really made me feel old. In my case it was paying $300 for a used 1MB board for a Zenith Z100. Can't even remember the year--somewhere in the mid- to late-1980s.IanCutress - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
I should point out that the kit I got was my first purchased kit on its own... Many computers before then where they were built my family or came pre-built.On the topic of A10 comparisons, I had thought of doing some in the future if enough interest was there. As the majority of CPU sales is in Intel's favor, we went with Intel first. (Also most of the testing for this review occurred before I had an A10 sample at hand.)
Ian
Termie - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
Great article, Ian. Thanks for taking on this challenge and enlightening us all.Don't worry about all the old-timers bugging you about your first build being in this century. It's not like they could have written this article!
arthur449 - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
I'd love to see an AMD CPU test run with the same memory kits and the same test suite to contrast the differences in performance gains offered by faster memory between the two major CPU platforms.lowenz - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
Make an extension to this brilliant article with new Trinity A8 / A10 and you'll be an instant geek hero.frozentundra123456 - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
Could you do a similar test in laptops, A10 vs HD4000? Like I said in my other post, this is where I see more possibility of igps actually being used for gaming. I also think this is where HD4000 is most competitive to AMD, in a power limited scenario.DanNeely - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
Have laptop bios's opened up enough in the last few years to let you specify memory timings? The advice I've always seen was to buy the cheapest ram at your laptops designated clockspeed because you won't be able to set the faster timings even if you wanted.haplo602 - Friday, October 19, 2012 - link
You have ONE set for each frequency, WHY the hell are you using the stupid model numbers in the graphs ????WHO CAME UP WITH THAT STUPID IDEA ????
otherwise the review is solid.