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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ssj4Gogeta - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
"Besides, do people really play games with IGP?"They're definitely more likely to play games on a more powerful IGP like AMD's. I thought the whole point of AMD's Fusion lineup was that you could do light gaming on the IGP itself.
SeanJ76 - Saturday, June 21, 2014 - link
Exactly! no one buys shitty AMD products anymore......Boogaloo - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
There are already plenty of benchmarks out there for memory scaling on AMD's APUs. This is the first time I've seen an in-depth look at how memory speed affects Intel's IGP performance.ssj4Gogeta - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
That's what I was thinking as well.I'm hoping for another article using Trinity. :)
Calin - Friday, October 19, 2012 - link
I'm not sure A10 supports DDR3-2400 (DDR3-1866 was the fastest memory supported)Medallish - Friday, October 19, 2012 - link
The A10 has AMP profiles(Like XMP on Intel) up to 2133MHz, however, there's always overclocking, I'm pretty sure Ivy Bridge doesn't suppoort 2400+MHz memory natively either. I'm looking at an FM2 board by Asrock which they claim can support 2600MHz memory.IanCutress - Friday, October 19, 2012 - link
My A10-5800K sort of liked DDR3-2400, then it didn't like it. Had to go back one to 2133 for the testing. Even with bumped voltages and everything else, the CPU memory controller couldn't take it. Perhaps the sample I have is a dud, but that was my experience.Ian
tim851 - Friday, October 19, 2012 - link
I concur.Pointless review anyway. The summary should have read: High-Clocked Memory only needed if your primary usage is either competitive benchmarking or WinRAR compression.
IanCutress - Saturday, October 20, 2012 - link
Did you know that before you read the article though? This is Anandtech, and I like to think I test things thoroughly enough to make reasoned opinions and suggestions :) Having a one sentence summary wouldn't have helped anyone in the slightest.Ian
SeanJ76 - Saturday, June 21, 2014 - link
Nothing is better done on AMD products idiot.....