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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svdb - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
This article is pointless and debating is futile. Everybody knows that ORANGE memory modules are always faster than BLACK one, but not as fast as RED ones! Duh...The same with cars...
jonjonjonj - Friday, October 26, 2012 - link
you keep saying that a big part of the heat sinks are too "prevent the competition from knowing what ICs are under the hood". do you really think if a competitor or anyone for that matter who wanted to know what ICs were being used are going to say damn we cant find out what the ICs are because the $45 memory has a heat sink? im pretty sure they are going to buy a kit and rip them apart.editorsorgtfo - Tuesday, October 14, 2014 - link
Sean, what a willie-brained banger-spanker you are! You probably still piss in your shorts when you discover that someone you've irked has smeared buggers on the screen of your monitor. "No one gives a shit about APU you moron......these are desktop tests!" I, for one, give a shit about APUs, you lummox, since I am building a top-quality box around an A10 7850K and a G1.Sniper A88X. Gamers who yank a joystick with one hand and wank off with the other aren't the only people that want a kickin' computer. My entire life isn't geared toward FPS, RTS or T, or MMORPG pursuits, nor do I do anything else that is graphics-processing intensive, like video editing, rendering, Bitcoin mining, etc., etc., so I don't need high-powered graphics, beyond what AMD's Dual Graphics with a Radeon R7 250 will achieve. My intent is to use my new APU machine for audio recording, and I'd like to be able to get a really good overall picture of how a Kaveri system will behave using 16 or 32GB of various brands of DDR3 1866 or 2133 CL8 or 9 @ 1.5V or under SDRAM, possibly using AMD's RAMDisk software, with a very good (250GB or larger Samsung 840 EVO or better SSD), and preferably using audio-oriented real and synthetic benchmarks, because Intel has the computer-video-game-playing world by the goolies, and to most gamers, winning is everything, so they go with Intel, never once thinking about how less than 2 decades ago, there was a third big player in the processor world: VIA! They got squeezed out of the desktop competition by Intel and AMD, and we are the worse for it. Anyway, this is not to disparage Ian's testing and write-up for this review (good on yer, mate!), because he used what he had on hand. But you, Sean -- why don't you just keep your witless gob shut if you don't have something interesting, enlighting, thought-provoking, useful, helpful, amusing... i.e., POSITIVE! to contribute? "AMD is a decade behind Intel, in processor technology and instructions, it really doesn't matter what AMD attempts to do...." For f*ck's sake -- get an effing life, kid! Then, maybe you'd finally get laid, and someday, even have a girlfriend and a car, instead of Five-Finger Mary and a skateboard!exodius - Monday, February 2, 2015 - link
You got one of the calculations wrong:DDR3-1866 11-11-11 has a Cycle Time of 1.07 ns and a Bit Time of 0.536 ns
The time to read one word should be 1.08 * 11 = 11.88 ns (not 11.79)
The time to read eight words should be 11.88 + 7 * 0.536 = 15.632 ns (not 15.54)
Unless i'm missing something