Memory Scaling on Haswell CPU, IGP and dGPU: DDR3-1333 to DDR3-3000 Tested with G.Skill
by Ian Cutress on September 26, 2013 4:00 PM ESTOur final set of tests are a little more on the esoteric side, using a tri-GPU setup with a HD5970 (dual GPU) and a HD5870 in tandem. While these cards are not necessarily the newest, they do provide some interesting results – particularly when we have memory accesses being diverted to multiple GPUs (or even to multiple GPUs on the same PCB). The 5970 GPUs are clocked at 800/1000, with the 5870 at 1000/1250.
Dirt 3: Average FPS
It is pretty clear that memory has an effect: +13% moving from 1333 C9 to 2133 C9/2400 C10. In fact, that 1333 C9 seems to be more of a sink than anything else – above 2133 MHz memory the performance benefits are minor at best. It all depends if 186.53 FPS is too low for you and you need 200+.
Dirt 3: Minimum FPS
We see a similar trend in minimum FPS for Dirt3: 1333 C9 is a sink, but moving to 2133 C9/2400 C10 gives at least a 20% jump in minimum frame rates.
Bioshock Infinite: Average FPS
While differences in Bioshock Infinite Minimum FPS are minor at best, 1333 MHz and 1600 C10/C11 are certainly at the lower end. Anything 1866 MHz or 2133 MHz seems to be the best bet here, especially in our case if we wanted to push for 120 FPS gaming.
Bioshock Infinite: Minimum FPS
Similar to Bioshock on IGP, minimum frame rates across the board seem to be very low, with minor differences giving large % rises.
Tomb Raider: Average FPS
Tomb Raider remains resilient to change across our benchmarks, with 1 FPS difference between the top and bottom average FPS results in our tri-GPU setup.
Tomb Raider: Minimum FPS
With our tri-GPU setup being a little odd (two GPUs on one PCB), Tomb Raider cannot seem to find much consistency for minimum frame rates, showing up to a 15% difference when compared to our 1600 C10 result which seems to be a lot lower than the rest.
Sleeping Dogs: Average FPS
Similar to other results, 1333 and 1600 MHz results give lower frame rates, along with the slower 1866 MHz C10/C11 options. Anything 2133 MHz and above gives up to 8% more performance than 1333 C9.
Sleeping Dogs: Minimum FPS:
Minimum frame rates are a little random in our setup, except for one constant – 1333 MHz memory does not perform. Everything beyond that seems to be at the whim of statistical variance.
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ShieTar - Friday, September 27, 2013 - link
I think you would have to propose a software benchmark which benefits from actually running from a Ramdisk. Testing the RD itself with some kind of synthetic HD-Benchmark will not give you much different results than a synthetic memory benchmark, unless the software implementation is rubbish.So if you want to see this happen, I suggest you explain to everybody what kind of software you use in combination with your Ramdisk, and why it benefits from it. And hope that this software is sufficiently relevant to get a large number of people interested in this kind of benchmark.
ShieTar - Friday, September 27, 2013 - link
Two comments on the "Performance Index" used in this article:1. It is calculated as the reverse of the actual access latency (in nanoseconds). Using the reverse of a physically meaningful number will always make the relationship exhibit much more of an "diminishing return" then when using the phyical attribute directly.
2. As no algorithm should care directly about the latency, but rather about the combined time to get the full data set it requested, it would be interesting to understand which is the typical size of a data set affecting the benchmarks indicate. If your software is randomly picking single bytes from the memory, you expect performance to only depend on the latency. On the other hand, if the software is reading complete rows (512 bytes), the bandwidth becomes more relevant than the latency.
Of course figuring out the best performance metric for any kind of review can take a lot of time and effort. But when you do a review generating this large amount of data anyways, would it be possible to make the raw data available to the readers, so they can try to get their own understanding on the matter?
Death666Angel - Friday, September 27, 2013 - link
First of all, great article and really good chart layout, very easy to read! :DBut one thing seems strange, the WinRAR 3.93 test, 2800MHz/C12 performs better than 2800MHz/C11, but you call out ...C11 in the text as performing well, even though anyone can increase their latencies without incurring stability issues (that's my experience at least). Switched numbers? :)
willis936 - Friday, September 27, 2013 - link
I too thought this was strange. You could see higher latencies clock for clock performing better which doesn't seem intuitive. I couldn't work out why those results were the way they were.ShieTar - Friday, September 27, 2013 - link
In reality, there really should be no reason why a longer latency should increase performance (unless you are programming some real-time code which depends on algorithm synchronization). Therefore it seems safe to interpret the difference as the measurement noise of this specific benchmark.Urbanos - Friday, September 27, 2013 - link
excellent article! i was waiting for one of these! great work, masterful :)jaydee - Friday, September 27, 2013 - link
Great work, I'd like to see a future article look at single-channel vs dual channel RAM in laptops/mITX/NUC configurations. With only two SO-DIMM slots, people have to really evaluate whether or not you want to fill both DIMM slots knowing you'd have to replace both of them if you want to upgrade but able to utilize the dual channels, or going with a single SO-DIMM, losing the dual channel but having an easier memory upgrade path down the road.Thanks and great work!
Hrel - Friday, September 27, 2013 - link
How do you get such nice screenshots of the BIOS? They look much nicer than when people just use a camera so what did you use to take those screenshots?merikafyeah - Friday, September 27, 2013 - link
Probably used a video capture card. These are also used to objectively evaluate GPU frame-pacing in a way that software like FRAPS cannot.Rob94hawk - Saturday, September 28, 2013 - link
Moder BIOS allow you to upload screenshots to USB. My MSI Z87 Gaming does it. No more picture taking. It's a great feature long overdue!