AnandTech: OCZ Introduces DDR3-1800

Gaming

Three DX9 games representing different gaming engines were used to test the performance of the OCZ DDR3-1800 Platinum in real world gaming. There are more recent gaming titles available, but they are also DX9. We will update games in the memory test suite as soon as a selection of DX10 games with reliable benchmarks is available. At that time the memory test OS will also be moved to Vista.

The Far Cry - River demo was run for three loops and results in FPS were averaged over the three runs. ALL games were run at 1280x1024 resolution, which is the maximum resolution for the most common 19" flat panel monitors.

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The Kingston tops performance at the slower DDR3-800 speed, but the Micron Z9-based memory takes top honors from 1066 to the Highest Speed DDR3. OCZ manages the best performance at those speeds with slightly faster timings than other Z9-based memory.

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Quake 4 and the underlying engine have always proved to be very sensitive to improvements in memory bandwidth. This is amply demonstrated in these memory tests. Kingston, based on Elpida LL memory, performs best at the slower 800 and 1066 speeds, with OCZ and the other Z9 memory topping DDR-1333 to DDR3-2000. The pattern is basically the same as in Far Cry. With the constant CPU speed of 3.0GHz we see frame rates improve from 116.8 at DDR3-800 5-3-3 to 128.7 at DDR3-2000 9-8-7, an improvement of just over 10%. We have commented many times that memory is just one small part of the performance equation, but a 10% improvement in a game frame rate merely as the result of an increase in memory speed (and FSB speed, though we can't isolate that factor at present) is significant. Far Cry sees a similar increase from 112.90 at 800 to 121.94 at DDR3-2000, which is about an 8% improvement.

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We include Half-Life 2: Lost Coast as a representative of games that are less sensitive to improvements in memory bandwidth. Lost Coast is played through the Steam engine, where there is the constant worry, for a reviewer, that each new update of Steam will break your test benchmarks. Though the differences are very subtle and HL2 performance is most influenced by the video card and CPU used in the benchmark, there are nonetheless patterns that are the same as the other two games. The Kingston wins by a small margin at 800 and 1066, while the OCZ tops the performance of Lost Coast from 1333 to 2000+. This game is not very sensitive to memory bandwidth so it is no real surprise that the performance improvement form 800 to 2000 is a small 3%.