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 ESTCPU Real World Performance
A small note on real world testing against synthetic testing – due to the way that DRAM affects a system, there can be a large disconnect between what we can observe in synthetic tests against real world testing. Synthetic tests are designed to exploit various feature XYZ, usually in an unrealistic scenario, such as pure memory read speeds or bandwidth numbers. While these are good for exploring the peak potential of a system, they often to not translate as well as CPU speed does if we invoke some common prosumer real world task. So while spending 10x on memory might show a large improvement in peak bandwidth numbers, users will have to weigh up the real world benefits in order to find the day-to-day difference when going for expensive hardware. Typically a limiting factor might be something else in the system, such as the size of a cache, so with all the will in the world a faster read speed won’t make much difference. As a result, we tend to stick to real world tests for almost all of our testing (with a couple of minor suggestions). Our benchmarks are either derived from areas such as transcoding a film or come from a regular software format such as molecular dynamics running a consistent scene.
Handbrake v0.9.9
For HandBrake, we take two videos (a 2h20 640x266 DVD rip and a 10min double UHD 3840x4320 animation short) and convert them to x264 format in an MP4 container. Results are given in terms of the frames per second processed, and HandBrake uses as many threads as possible.
The low quality conversion is more reliant on CPU cycles available, while the high resolution conversion seems to have a very slight ~3% benefit moving up to DDR4-3000 memory.
WinRAR 5.01
Our WinRAR test from 2013 is updated to the latest version of WinRAR at the start of 2014. We compress a set of 2867 files across 320 folders totaling 1.52 GB in size – 95% of these files are small typical website files, and the rest (90% of the size) are small 30 second 720p videos.
The biggest difference showed a 5% gain over DDR4-2133 C15, although this seemed at random.
FastStone Image Viewer 4.9
FastStone Image Viewer is a free piece of software I have been using for quite a few years now. It allows quick viewing of flat images, as well as resizing, changing color depth, adding simple text or simple filters. It also has a bulk image conversion tool, which we use here. The software currently operates only in single-thread mode, which should change in later versions of the software. For this test, we convert a series of 170 files, of various resolutions, dimensions and types (of a total size of 163MB), all to the .gif format of 640x480 dimensions. Results shown are in seconds, lower is better.
No difference between the memory speeds in FastStone.
x264 HD 3.0 Benchmark
The x264 HD Benchmark uses a common HD encoding tool to process an HD MPEG2 source at 1280x720 at 3963 Kbps. This test represents a standardized result which can be compared across other reviews, and is dependent on both CPU power and memory speed. The benchmark performs a 2-pass encode, and the results shown are the average frame rate of each pass performed four times. Higher is better this time around.
The faster memory showed a 2.5% gain on the first pass, but less than a 1% gain in the second pass.
7-Zip 9.2
As an open source compression tool, 7-Zip is a popular tool for making sets of files easier to handle and transfer. The software offers up its own benchmark, to which we report the result.
At most a 2% gain was shown by 3000+ memory.
Mozilla Kraken 1.1
One of the more popular web benchmarks that stresses various codes, we run this benchmark in Chrome 35.
Kraken seemed to prefer the fast 1.2V memory, giving a 4.8% gain at DDR4-2800 C16, although this did not translate into the faster memory.
WebXPRT
A more in-depth web test featuring stock price rendering, image manipulation and face recognition algorithms, also run in Chrome 35.
The DDR4-3200 gave an 11% gain over the base JEDEC memory, although this seemed to be more of a step than a slow rise.
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JlHADJOE - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
Will be interesting to see another article like this when we have CPUs with integrated graphics and DDR4.OrphanageExplosion - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
"For any user interested in performance, memory speed is an important part of the equation when it comes to building your next system."Doesn't your article actually disprove your initial statement?
And surely your gaming benchmarks might make more sense if - once again - you actually tested CPU intensive titles as opposed to the titles you've tested? The GPU will barely touch your expensive DDR4, if at all.
The only scenario I can see DDR4 making a real difference will be in graphics work with AMD APUs, and even then we'll need to see really high-end, fast kits that should just about offer comparable bandwidth with the slowest GDDR5 to offer a literally game-changing improvement.
Sushisamurai - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
Errr... Memory speed did make a difference (small IMO) when it came to DDR3. This article tests if it holds true to DDR4 - however, without an iGPU the other tests don't really show a significant difference when price is factored in. I mean, sure, there's a difference, but not worth the price premium IMO.A future AMD comparison would be nice, when AMD decides to support DDR4... Otherwise, it was a nice article.
FlushedBubblyJock - Sunday, February 15, 2015 - link
That's called the "justify wasting my life to write this article, tag and hook and sinker line, plus the required tokus kissing to the kind manu's that handed over their top tier for some "free" advertising and getting out the word.It's not like the poor bleary eyed tester can say: " I didn't want to do this because one percent difference is just not worth it, my name is not K1ngP1n and I'm not getting 77 free personal jet flights this year to go screw around in nations all over the world.
vgobbo - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
I really enjoyed this review!But... Intel processors are massive cache beasts, which reduces a lot the pressure put on memory (except for games, which I believe was the most interesting part of this review). Said that, I wish to see a review on an AMD system, which have a lot weaker cache structure and memory buses.
Is this possible to happen, or I'm just a dreamer? ;D
Anyway, this was another outstanding review of Anandtech! Loved it! Thank u guys!
dazelord - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
Interesting, but isn't Haswell-E/X99 accessing the memory in 256bit mode using 4 dimms? I suspect the gains would be much more substantial in 128bit/ 2 dimm systems.willis936 - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
Good stuff but after seeing a fair bit of memory roundups in my time I think this mostly confirms what everyone has been thinking: DDR4 is incredibly underwhelming in the performance space. You not only get better bang for buck with DDR3 right now but comparable, if not better, performance in the high end kits.galta - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
You've got it wrong. Nobody goes for DDR4 because of the memory, it's because of the new CPU and chipset.Ask yourself: do you really need extra cores and/or pci lanes? Or, do you want them and have the money to pay for it? If the answer is "yes" than you'll go for 5xxx and DDR4 is incidental.
Otherwise, go 4xxx and DDR3 will also be incidental.
It makes no sense to talk about memory as if it could be chosen independently from CPU/chipset.
rmh26 - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
Ian could you post more information about the NPB fluid dynamics benchmark. Specifically which benchmark CG, EP, FT ... and which class problem S, W, A, ...etc. In my own research I have found the simulation time to scale nearly linearly with the memory frequency for large enough problems. I am wondering how much the cache has to do with masking the effects of memory frequency on performance. As a the size of the problem gets larger the cache will no longer be able to mask the slowness of the memory. In general memory, and moreover interconnects between computers play a very important role in some HPC applications the rely on solving partial differential equations. In fact there have been suggestions to move away from the standard HPC Linpack benchmark used to create the top 500 lists as this compute intensive benchmark does not accurately reflect the load placed on supercomputers.http://insidehpc.com/2013/07/replacing-linpack-jac...
Dasa2 - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
Congrats anandtech you screwed up another ram review further misleading peopleThe games you chose to review are so badly GPU bottlenecked its sad. Do you not know that ram performance affects cpu performance?
You could run Dirt 3 with a i3 2100 vs a 5ghz 5960x and get the same score
How about putting some different CPU in amongst your ram benchmarks like 4460-4690 5820-5960x so people can see how faster ram compares to spending more on the CPU...
A 4690k with 1600c11 ram can perform slower in games than a 2500k with 2133c9 ram