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
Market Positioning
Over recent years the price of DDR3 memory kits has hit record lows quarter on quarter. This means that profit margins for companies are also getting smaller and smaller – it becomes hard to differentiate yourself as a product line on price alone. This is the reason why a lot of the kits we have looked at today are designed to be visually eye catching – having either colored heatsinks, detachable heatsinks or shaped designs.
The pricing for each of the kits are as follows:
$75: Ares DDR3-1333 9-9-9 4x4 GB
$80: RipjawsX DDR3-1600 9-9-9 4x4 GB
$95: Sniper DDR3-1866 9-10-9 4x4 GB
$130: RipjawsZ DDR3-2133 9-11-10 4x4 GB
$145: TridentX DDR3-2400 10-12-12 4x4 GB
The margin between the 1333 MHz and 1600 MHz kits is $5, and as such would only be differentiated between tight budget constraints, bulk sales or aesthetic looks. The jump up to 1866 MHz is slightly more, but going up to DDR3-2133 and beyond is a significant jump in price, indicative of the binning process required for these higher end modules. The testing in this review will show if the leap up to DDR3-2133 memory is proportionally a good idea.
Test Bed
| Test Bed | |
| Processor |
i7-3770K @ 4.4 GHz 4 Cores / 8 Threads |
| Motherboard | ASUS P8Z77-V Premium |
| Memory |
G.Skill 1333 MHz 9-9-9-24 1.5V 4x4GB Kit G.Skill 1600 MHz 9-9-9-24 1.5V 4x4GB Kit G.Skill 1866 MHz 9-10-9-28 1.5V 4x4GB Kit G.Skill 2133 MHz 9-11-10-28 1.65V 4x4GB Kit G.Skill 2400 MHz 10-12-12-31 1.65V 4x4GB Kit |
| CPU Cooler | Intel Stock Cooler |
| Graphics Cards |
Intel HD4000 ECS GTX580 |
| Power Supply | Rosewill SilentNight 500W Platinum |
| Storage | OCZ Vertex3 240GB |
| SATA 6Gbps to USB 3.0 | Thermaltake BlacX 5G Docking Station |
| Thunderbolt Device | Lacie Little Big Disk 240GB |
| Test Bench | Coolermaster Test Bed |
| Operating System | Windows 7 x64 Ultimate |
Many thanks to...
We must thank the following companies for kindly donating hardware for our test bed:
OCZ for donating the USB testing SSD
G.Skill for donating our memory kits
ASUS for donating the IO testing kit
ECS for donating NVIDIA GPUs
Rosewill for donating the Power Supply
I would like to extend thanks for Rosewill, as this is the first review we have used their new SilentNight 500W Platinum power supply. I first saw this bit of kit at Computex – a silent power supply capable of 500W and Platinum certified sounds like a great bit of kit and it was flawless during out testing. When I received the power supply I made an unboxing video before it went on sale:
It currently retails for $180 on Newegg.
ASUS MemTweakIt
With our overview of the ASUS Republic of Gamers range of products, one piece of software caught my eye while I was testing. The ASUS MemTweakIt allows for almost complete control of the memory subtimings while in the OS, such that users can optimize their settings for memory reads, memory writes, or for pushing the boundaries. The upshot of this software in our context is that it takes all the sub-timings and settings and condenses them into a score. As the memory kits we test contain XMP profiles, these profiles determine a large majority of the sub-timings on the kit and how aggressive a memory manufacturer is. We should see this represented in our MemTweakIt score.
As we do not know the formula by which ASUS calculates this value, it has to be taken with a pinch of salt. It could be weighted in favor of one of the settings versus the other. Normally I would not put such an non-descript benchmark as part of our testing suite, but the MemTweakIt software does give us one descriptor – it gives us a theoretical rate of improvement across the range of kits we test, and allows us to order them in the way they should perform. With this being said, the results for our kits are as follows:
The rise in MemTweakIt score does not follow the price increases – for an almost doubling of the cost of the memory kit, we only see a 17.76% rise in the score. What this score means, we will see in due course.
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andrewaggb - Friday, October 19, 2012 - link
Fair enough :-)HisDivineOrder - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
You "remember" getting your first memory kit and it was for a E6400. You act like that's just this classic thing.I remember getting a memory kit for my Celeron 300a. I remember getting a memory kit for my AMD K6 with 3dNow!.
Wow, I'm old.
silverblue - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
I remember getting a 64MB PC100 DIMM in 2000... it was pretty much £1 a MB. Made a difference, so it was *gulp* worth it.StormyParis - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
Very interesting read. Thank you.rscoot - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
I remember paying upwards of $400 for a pair of matched 2x512MB Kingston HyperX modules with BH-5 chips. Those were the days! 300MHz at 2-2-2-5 1T in dual channel if you could put enough volts through them. Nowadays I don't think memory matters nearly as much as it did back then.superflex - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
Your first kit was an E6400?Let me know when you get hair down there.
My first computer was an Apple IIe in 1984, and my first build was an Opteron 170 with 400 MHz 2,2,2,5 DDR.
Magnus101 - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
Once again this only confirms that memory speed makes no real world difference.I mean, who in their right mind use the integrated GPU on an expensive i7-system to play metro-2033 with single digit framerate?
The only thing standing out is the Winrar compression, but, how many use winrar for compression?
Yes to decompress files it is very common but I only remember using it 2-3 times in my whole life to compress my own files.
So that isn't important to most users, except for the ones that actually use winrar to compress files.
And I don't get why the x264 encoding seemed like a big deal. The differences were very small.
It's beem the same story all the way back to the late 90;s were tests between sdr memory at 100 and 133 MHz or at different timings showed no differences in real life applications in contrast to synthetics.
But sure, if you are building a new system and choose between, let say 1333 or 1600, then a $5 difference is a no brainer.
Then again, it would make no noticeable difference anyway.
silverblue - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
Here's one - will it affect QuickSync in any way?twoodpecker - Monday, October 22, 2012 - link
I'd be interested in QuickSync results too. In my experience, not proven, it makes a big difference. I adjusted my memory speeds from 1600 to 2000 and noticed at some point that encoding is 25x instead of 15x. This might be due to different factors though, like software optimizations, because I didn't benchmark after adjusting mem speeds.Geofram - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
I don't believe he's implying that single digit frame rates on a game are going to real-life usable for anyone. I believe the point of the test was simply: "Lets take a system that is generally fast and put it in a situation where the IGP is being stressed. This will be the best-case scenario for faster RAM helping it. Lets see if it does".To me the idea was not showing everyone everyday situations where faster RAM will help them, instead it was to see where those situations might lay, by setting up a stressful situation and seeing the results. Most of the results were extremely small differences.
I agree it's not a noticeable difference in most cases. It doesn't make me feel like I should get rid of PC1333 RAM. I don't fault the logic for the tests used however. It was nice to see someone actually comparing the slight differences caused by RAM speed.