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
As mentioned in the DDR3-1600 kit, as processors develop the manufacturers raise the minimum speed to which those processors and memory controllers are rated. This means that higher speed memory kits are guaranteed, and as such the market has to adjust – with the high end Trinity processors supporting DDR3-1866 out of the box, the rest of the spectrum will rise to cover this. As a result, the memory manufacturers have to argue for better deals over their ICs, and make sure the design of the ICs will secure higher yields of the faster stuff which they can sell on to the users. Our leap from DDR3-1600 to DDR3-1866 is a leap from an $80 kit to a $95 kit, or an increase in ~19% in the price.
Visual Inspection
The Sniper kits are the oddest of G.Skill’s lineup. As we can see in the images below, the heatsink is shaped like a rifle. Bonus points if you can tell us what rifle it is meant to be. The benefits of having a rifle as a heatsink may point towards building a Gigabyte G-series system or MSI Big Bang XPower rig, both of which take designs using weapons as part of the standard. Apart from this, there is not much benefit to a stylized heatsink such as this – heat dissipation will be similar to the other kits in this review, and the main reason for this heatsink is to protect the user and competition from knowing what ICs are under the hood.
As with the RipjawsX kit, I placed a module of the kit in our system with the TRUE Copper, just to see the effect of having a large air cooler would have on the nearest memory module on a motherboard:
Again due to the height of the module, large air coolers that impinge on the memory slots will cause the Sniper kits to be placed at an angle.
JEDEC + XMP Settings
| G.Skill | |||||
| Kit Speed | 1333 | 1600 | 1866 | 2133 | 2400 |
| Subtimings | 9-9-9-24 2T | 9-9-9-24 2T | 9-10-9-28 2T | 9-11-10-28 2T | 10-12-12-31 2T |
| Price | $75 | $80 | $95 | $130 | $145 |
| XMP | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Size | 4 x 4 GB | 4 x 4 GB | 4 x 4 GB | 4 x 4 GB | 4 x 4 GB |
|
|
|||||
| MHz | 1333 | 1600 | 1867 | 2134 | 2401 |
| Voltage | 1.500 | 1.500 | 1.500 | 1.650 | 1.650 |
| tCL | 9 | 9 | 9 | 9 | 10 |
| tRCD | 9 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
| tRP | 9 | 9 | 9 | 10 | 12 |
| tRAS | 24 | 24 | 28 | 28 | 31 |
| tRC | 33 | 33 | 37 | 38 | 43 |
| tWR | 10 | 12 | 14 | 16 | 16 |
| tRRD | 4 | 5 | 5 | 6 | 7/6 |
| tRFC | 107 | 128 | 150 | 171 | 313 |
| tWTR | 5 | 6 | 8/7 | 9/8 | 10/9 |
| tRTP | 5 | 6 | 8/7 | 9/8 | 10/9 |
| tFAW | 20 | 24 | 24 | 25 | 26 |
| tCWL | - | 7 | 7 | 7 | 7 |
| CR | - | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 |
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vegemeister - Friday, October 19, 2012 - link
Most of the (still tiny) difference that appeared in the x264 benchmark was in the first pass. Two pass encodes really only make sense when you're trying to fit a single video onto a single storage device. That's an extremely uncommon use case these days, for everyone but the people mastering blu-rays.jonyah - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
"I remember buying my first memory kit ever. It was a 4GB kit of OCZ DDR2 for my brand new E6400 system, and at the time I paid ~$240, sometime back in 2005."I remember buying my first kit too. It was an upgrade from the 2MB I had to 6MB (yes MB, not GB), and that 6MB cost me $200 as well, this was back in 1995. Ten years and we had a 1000x improvement in size and who knows how much in speed.
rchris - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
Well, dang it! All these "I remember..." comments have really made me feel old. In my case it was paying $300 for a used 1MB board for a Zenith Z100. Can't even remember the year--somewhere in the mid- to late-1980s.IanCutress - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
I should point out that the kit I got was my first purchased kit on its own... Many computers before then where they were built my family or came pre-built.On the topic of A10 comparisons, I had thought of doing some in the future if enough interest was there. As the majority of CPU sales is in Intel's favor, we went with Intel first. (Also most of the testing for this review occurred before I had an A10 sample at hand.)
Ian
Termie - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
Great article, Ian. Thanks for taking on this challenge and enlightening us all.Don't worry about all the old-timers bugging you about your first build being in this century. It's not like they could have written this article!
arthur449 - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
I'd love to see an AMD CPU test run with the same memory kits and the same test suite to contrast the differences in performance gains offered by faster memory between the two major CPU platforms.lowenz - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
Make an extension to this brilliant article with new Trinity A8 / A10 and you'll be an instant geek hero.frozentundra123456 - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
Could you do a similar test in laptops, A10 vs HD4000? Like I said in my other post, this is where I see more possibility of igps actually being used for gaming. I also think this is where HD4000 is most competitive to AMD, in a power limited scenario.DanNeely - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
Have laptop bios's opened up enough in the last few years to let you specify memory timings? The advice I've always seen was to buy the cheapest ram at your laptops designated clockspeed because you won't be able to set the faster timings even if you wanted.haplo602 - Friday, October 19, 2012 - link
You have ONE set for each frequency, WHY the hell are you using the stupid model numbers in the graphs ????WHO CAME UP WITH THAT STUPID IDEA ????
otherwise the review is solid.