DDR4 Haswell-E Scaling Review: 2133 to 3200 with G.Skill, Corsair, ADATA and Crucial
by Ian Cutress on February 5, 2015 10:10 AM ESTSingle GTX 770 Gaming
The normal avenue for faster memory lies in integrated graphics solutions, but as Haswell-E does not have integrated graphics we are testing typical gaming scenarios using relatively high end graphics cards. First up is a single MSI GTX 770 Lightning in our Haswell-E system, running our benchmarks at 1080p and maximum settings. We take the average frame rates and minimum frame rates for each of our tests.
Dirt 3: Average FPS
Dirt 3: Minimum FPS
Bioshock Infinite: Average FPS
Bioshock Infinite: Minimum FPS
Tomb Raider: Average FPS
Tomb Raider: Minimum FPS
Sleeping Dogs: Average FPS
Sleeping Dogs: Minimum FPS
Conclusions at 1080p/Max with a GTX 770
The only real deficit observed throughout our testing is the DDR4-2133 C15 4x4GB kit dropping down to 121 FPS in F1 2013 from a 126 FPS average from the other kits, resulting in a less-than 5% drop by choosing the default JEDEC kit in the 4x4 configuration. Moving up to the 4x8 and 8x8 produces 125 FPS, but anything above 2133 C15 gets around the top result from 125-127.
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jabber - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
Crikey...I'm still on 16GB of DDR2 ECC! I feel old.foxtrot1_1 - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
If you're still running DDR2 it's probably not the RAM that's holding your system back.nathanddrews - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
Clearly. It's rather sad to see how little impact RAM has on performance... which begs the question of who is buying this stuff? Is the only strength stability during overclocking?III-V - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
Well Haswell-E users are tied to DDR4, so yeah there's that :)Of course, that's not what you were talking about. Memory bandwidth can have a big effect on certain workloads. IGPs need a bit of it (tapers off hard after 2133 MHz), but I know programs like WinZip and 7-Zip love memory bandwidth. There's certainly a lot of server and HPC workloads that love it too, but for most users, you're certainly right -- it's not worth it at the moment and may not really ever be a concerning bottleneck.
r3loaded - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
You mean to say you've not bought a single computer since Core 2? Damn!Murloc - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
well do you really need additional CPU power?My overclocked E8500 (with stock cooler) was a beast, there was so much headroom, and I didn't change computer because of it.
Right now I'm on a i5 750 from 2009 or something and it's totally fine. Also my GTX 275 still handles games in full hd just fine although not at max settings and it also becomes hot and only has DX10 so it's obsolete.
So after 6 years, it's only the GPU that could use upgrading, the CPU/RAM part is not bottlenecking anything.
Well not having sata 6 and that limiting my SSD is the one bad thing. I don't have any USB3 pendrives so I don't miss that.
It's technology and power consumption making my CPU/chipset obsolete rather than performance.
Guspaz - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
I'm still running a first-gen i7 (Nehalem) as my work computer, and it's still plenty snappy. I've got 12GB of RAM in the thing, and whatever I do have in the way of performance limitations would largely be resolved by sticking an SSD in there.svan1971 - Sunday, February 8, 2015 - link
Get the PX-AG256M6e say goodbye to sata 3 limitations. I put one in an old x58 board and its amazing what a 6 year old 3.6 oc'd i7 can do.mikato - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link
Nice post. I had an E7300 system and I had already upgraded the GPU to a GTX 760 and maxed out memory. It was somewhat slow in the newer games I played (Call of Duty), then I bought an E8500 on ebay and put that in and overclocked it finding a sweet spot, but it was still not quite as fast as I wanted. The poor optimization of COD Ghosts was partly to blame, but I ended up redoing the whole system at that point.I do use an i7-950 Bloomfield at work still and it does just fine.
jabber - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
Just in clarify, I'm running a dual quad core 3.33Ghz Xeon setup. Still keeps up with a i7 in a lot of cases. They cost peanuts too.