Corsair Dominator 3x2GB PC3-12800 C8 Memory Review

Memory Benchmarks

Everest Ultimate is the most useful tool for any and all bench markers or overclockers. With the ability to read most voltage, temperature, and fan sensors on almost every motherboard available, Everest provides the ability to customize the outputs in a number of forms for display on your desktop. In addition to this, the memory benchmarking provides a useful tool of measuring the changes to your memory sub-system when tweaking to measure the differences.

This comparison actually has us quite intrigued and really brought a sense of anticipation for results. Normally memory benchmarks are pretty ho-hum, but with triple channel memory on this X58 platform being so new, we are going to learn something today. Right out of the gate, Everest seems to show a mixed bag of results when looking at the 3x1GB VS 3x2GB battle. In bandwidth the 3x1GB kit falls behind both overclocked 3x2GB configurations but at the same time is biting at the heels of the higher clocked 6GB results. Everest has been a good bit sketchy with i7 results so we won't buy too much into the numbers just yet.

The latency results show just as tight a race and show there may be some differences, but the margin for error between runs in Everest are just too great to hang a hat on these initial results. Let's move on to SiSoft Sandra and see what it makes of the different setups.

SiSoft Sandra is a popular and well used benchmark in the industry but not really a friend of serious benchmarkers. The results SiSoft Sandra produces have been suspect at times basing the numbers it comes up with on system specs and not actual testing. The latest version of Sandra seems to be one of the few programs that appear to calculate memory bandwidth consistently so we decided to include it in today’s benchmarks. Like we have always said with SiSoft Sandra though, take these results for what they are and nothing more.

Unlike Everest, SiSoft Sandra has come up with some rather neat looking results. Not neat as in interesting, rather neat as in contrived. My beef with Sandra is that the results always seem to be exactly what they 'should' be, and these numbers are no different. We simply won't provide further comment but let's just say, these results are a little too uniform, but do show the 3x1GB kit falling substantially behind both overclocked 6GB setups.

The memory latency numbers, unlike the bandwidth results, are conducive to what Everest showed. The 3x1GB and 3x2GB setups clocked to 900MHz @ 8-8-8 seem to be neck and neck with the stock and 7-7-7 results falling ever so slightly behind. I guess all we can do is look at Sciencemark to see if it helps validate either Everest or Sandra in what they have shown.

ScienceMark is an almost ancient benchmark utility at this point in time and hasn't seen an update in a long time. It is, however, still a favorite for accurately calculating bandwidth on even the newest chipsets.

Here we see a similar pattern to SiSoft Sandra and, in our opinion, Sciencemark is the most reliable bandwidth measurement program of the bunch. If that is in fact the case, it does appear Sandra is on the right track and perhaps should be looked at a little closer with these i7 results. We are not ready to eat our words just yet about Sandra but it could possibly be predicting slightly lower performance in programs based on these bandwidth numbers. There is only one way to find out though, and that is what we are going to do right now.