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 ESTComparing DDR3 to DDR4
Moving from a standard DDR3-2133 C11 kit to DDR4-2133 C15, just by looking at the numbers, feels like a downgrade despite what the rest of the system is. Ideally we want the first number, the frequency, to be high and the second number, the latency, to be low. After spending several years dealing with DDR3, moving to DDR4 feels a bit of a backwards step when you look at solely the numbers on paper.
As part of this review we have covered many different areas where DDR4 is the upgrade of DDR3, not only in terms of voltage but some of the underlying concepts as well. This puts DDR4 in a position for upgradability in the future, especially when it comes to density and future technologies (see the next page for more information). But an ultimate question still remains: at the same frequency and latency, do they perform the same?
The only way to perform an identical comparison would be to have a platform that could probe both DDR3 and DDR4 while keeping the same CPU. If one comes along, we will test that, but in the mean time we can do some broad comparisons with near-identical systems.
For this test we took two Haswell based systems and compared them against each other. The first contains the Haswell-E i7-5960X processor, cut it down to run at four cores with no HyperThreading, fixed the CPU speed at 4 GHz and placed the memory into DDR4-2133 14-14-14 350 2T timings. We did the same with the second system, a Haswell based i7-4770K moved it to 4 GHz and making sure it was in 4C/4T mode. The OS was placed into a unique high performance profile and we ran our test suite. The only difference that remained between the two setups was the L2 and L3 cache, which we cannot change unfortunately.
In our non-gaming tests, there is one situation where DDR3 is more than 3% better and two where DDR4 is +3%. It is worth noting that most of the numbers, especially with things like the Web and Cinebench are actually slightly negative.
In the gaming tests, similarly there are more +3% on the side of DDR4. If we do a direct comparison regardless of the percentage, DDR4 wins 11 times compared to DDR3 getting 8, and almost of DDR3’s wins are minor except for two-way SLI. It would seem that for two-way SLI DDR4 at least brings up some of the minimum frame rates.
Pulling out the >3% difference numbers, just to see what the numbers exactly are:
On the face of it, the Hybrid result does not seem that different, whereas a full minute on Photoscan or 10 seconds in our WinRAR test feels like a difference. In the gaming tests moving nearer to 120 FPS or 60 FPS, especially in both of the minimum frame rate tests, is an important jump which happens with DDR4.
Overall, comparing DDR4 to DDR3, there is little difference to separate the two. In a couple of small instances one is better than the other, but on those edge cases it might be prudent to say that we cannot make a final decision until we can synchronize the rest of the system, such as the size of CPU caches. When we can perform such tests, we will run some more numbers.
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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