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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Dasa2 - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
To back up some of what i said here is a few linksI3 2100 matching 2500k@4ghz in dirt 3
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-fx-pent...
Arma a cpu bottlnecked game where a 2600k@4.3ghz with 2133c9 ram is faster than at 4.9ghz with 1600c11
http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?166512-A...
Thief CPU|RAM performance
http://forums.atomicmpc.com.au/index.php/topic/557...
Bf4 1600c9=60fps 2400c10=70fps
http://www.team-greatbritain.com/call-of-duty-ghos...
Xbit ddr3 review looks a bit different to yours...
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/memory/display/ha...
Margalus - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
And not one of those is using ddr4...Dasa2 - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
Nope hence why I would like a decent review site like anandtech to do a proper job of there ddr4 reviewIm not expecting a big of a difference from higher speeds quad channel ddr4 by comparison to what can be seen in dual channel ddr3 but even there haswell ddr3 tests showed jack all due to the same problem with there tests so how can we know for sure
FlushedBubblyJock - Sunday, February 15, 2015 - link
You're correct, you made your points, so of course someone without many watts currently on display there said something silly, as usual being stupid pays off and those not dumbed down to base below average levels suffer the frustrating beyond belief consequences.mrcaffeinex - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
The problem is that we currently do not have a non-enthusiast platform available that supports DDR4. The new X99 platform is also running quad-channel, so the best comparison to a prior platform would have to be using X79 (attempting to keep as close to apples to apples as possible). The point that can be taken from this article as it is right now, is that you can skip buying insanely-priced DDR4-3000+ memory because your X99 rig will probably not perform noticeably different with DDR4-2133.As the process matures and more systems adopt DDR4, then you'll be able to do a better comparison across multiple performance levels, but as it is right now, if you're buying into X99, you're buying a high-end CPU. I look forward to the extensive comparative tests that you have mentioned, but I do not see them happening until either the mainstream platform (LGA 115x) is running DDR4 or AMD has any offering that supports DDR4.
Dasa2 - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
Unfortunately you cant take that from this article as the gaming tests wouldnt show if there was any gain from faster ram even if it did boost cpu performance by 15%These tests were worse than a complete waist of time from a gaming perspective as they could be very misleading
At a guess i would expect to see somewhere between 3-7% difference going from ddr4 2133 to ddr4 3200 at the same timings although most of that gain will probably be between 2133 and 2666 happy to be proven wrong though
Sushisamurai - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
although I agree it would be nice to see the impact DDR4 timings and speeds on CPU bound games, I unfortunately don't see the real world application to it. With DDR4, we're working on Haswell-E, which already has a lot of compute power - if we were to run into any CPU bottlenecks, wouldn't it make more sense to spend more of the budget into the CPU instead of RAM? Unless, you had enough money to buy top CPU and top RAM, then the point becomes quite moot no?Dasa2 - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
Depends how big the gain is from faster ram doesnt it and we wont know that until its tested properly with the ram speed compared cpu speeds toTesting cpu or ram performance with gpu bottleneck games is a waist of time unless your AMD trying to sell fx8150...
The only cpu limited games at this stage on Haswell-E will be the ones with bad multithreading support so spending a heap more on the cpu for extra cores from the 5960x wont help
What will help is spending extra for a better overclock and maybe faster ram but how far do you go
tim851 - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
> The games you chose to review are so badly GPU bottlenecked its sad.That's why they were running these games at reduced resolutions and IQ settings, Einstein.
What game should Anandtech benchmark that is NOT GPU LIMITED - Quake 3 Arena?
Dasa2 - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
They shouldnt reduce detail settings just no aa and resolution to 1080p while running a gtx980 or two (r9-290\gtx970\gtx780oc minimum)But with the likes of dirt 3 even if they do reduce detail settings its still gpu bottlnecked
Arma\Dayz are some of the only games that can be cpu bottlnecked with a single gtx770
Dying Light is very demanding on both cpu and gpu
http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c...
There is a lot of games that can be a bit of a blend of cpu\gpu limitation with enough gpu power although most of these will run 60fps fine on a 5820k a fair few of them wont do 120-144fps
http://translate.google.com/translate?depth=6&...
As they are a blend there limitation can vary from one part of the game to the next for example testing BF4 SP although easier to get consistent results will be far more gpu limited than MP some levels will also be more gpu limited than others
This is why i suggest putting different models and clocks speeds of cpu in against ram speed results so that people can see where the limit really is and where money is best spent