Corsair Dominator 3x2GB PC3-12800 C8 Memory Review

System Benchmarks

When running the 32M benchmark of SPi, we are calculating Pi to 32 million digits and timing the process. Obviously more CPU power helps in this intense calculation, but the memory sub-system also plays an important role, as does the operating system. SPi 32M has been a favorite amongst benchmarks for these very reasons and is admittedly the favorite benchmark of this reviewer.

The first of our system benchmarks is always SPi 32M because it could really be part of bandwidth. With all things equal, memory frequency is king of SPi 32M. With that being said, our results shouldn't be a surprise if you have done any testing of 3x1GB VS 3x2GB in 32M. It was an early known fact that 3x2GB kits are quicker in 32M because that is one of the first things us benchmarkers tested when i7 came out. Confirming those early results are the numbers above. With everything equal, the 3x2GB kit is quicker, but surprisingly by less than a single percentage point. Even still, for 32M elite benchmarkers, those 4.5 seconds are worth a lifetime of tweaking so 3x2GB kits of memory should be had whenever possible. Translating these numbers to real world though, less than 1% is less than 1%...AKA nothing.

The latest iteration of the popular system benchmark is PCMark Vantage from the Futuremark crew. The PCMark series has always been a great way to either test specific areas of a system or to get a general over view of how your system is performing. For our results, we simply run the basic benchmark suite which involves a wide range of tests on all of the sub-systems of the computer.

Isn't this an interesting turn of events, and a substantial win for the 3x2GB kit. The gap is so dramatic that we honestly feel there is something wrong with this benchmark when it comes down to volume of memory. It simply could be that PCMark Vantage just pushes the system and uses up a lot of system memory giving a big advantage to the 3x2GB setup. Either way, PCMark Vantage is simply a synthetic benchmark, it will be interesting to see if this kind of gain can be had with real world apps.

Another benchmarking community favorite, Cinebench renders an intense 2D scene relying on all the processing power it can. Cinebench R10 is another 64-bit capable application and is likely the most efficient program tested today at utilizing all cores of a processor. We will be running both the single threaded and multi-threaded benches here today.

Cinebench is primarily a CPU dependant benchmark and that seems to be the case here. The 3x1GB kit actually performs best in the average of three runs but the difference between runs of any given setup was greater than the difference between the 3x1GB 8-8-8 setup and the 3x2GB setup. Because of this it is pretty much safe to say memory had little to no effect on these results.

Next up is a real life benchmark where we simply time a common task done on the computer. Encoding DVDs for viewing on the computer or other devices is an increasingly important task that the personal computer has taken on. We will take a VOB rip of the movie Office Space, and convert it into DivX using the default 720P setting of the new DivX converter v7.1.

In the first real world test, we get the second big and decisive victory for the 3x2GB setups. Even the lower clocked 7-7-7 configuration handles the 3x1GB kit handily. From the fastest 3x2GB kit to the 3x1GB kit, we see a one minute and forty second gain. That is nearly an 8% decrease in encoding time, which is rather significant for those doing a lot of this type of work on their systems. After a whole pile of narrow or indecisive results, we finally have our first outright win for the 3x2GB setup.

Un-like the DivX conversion we just looked at, Lame Front End is not multi-threaded and only utilizes a single core of a processor. This will obviously limit performance but we should still recognize significant time savings going from the stock settings to the overclocked results. We will be encoding a WAV rip of the Blackalicious album, Blazing Arrow and converting it to MP3 using the VBR 0 quality preset.

Following up the DivX victory, the 3x2GB kits again handle the 3x1GB kit in the single threaded Lame Front End benchmark converting WAV files to MP3. The difference is smaller but in a single threaded application showing over a 5% gain is pretty substantial. Make that two wins for the 3x2GB kits.

Adobe Photoshop CS4 is fully x64 compliant and ready and able to use every single CPU cycle our processor has available including the implementation of GPU support utilizing the GTX 280 in our test system. It is just a shame it can't fully utilize all 8 threads of the i7 processor yet. We have changed our Photoshop benchmark to more of a standardized test configured by DriverHeaven.net. Their Photoshop benchmark utilizes 15 filters and effects on an uncompressed 109MB .JPG image that will test not only the CPU but also the memory subsystem of our test bench. Each portion of the benchmark is timed and added together for a final time that is compared below.

The 3x2GB momentum hits a bit of a snag as we move to the Photoshop CS4 benchmark. This came as a surprise to us as we figured CS4 would show some solid gains to the larger volume of memory but that clearly wasn't the case. We have a dead heat race between the two setups with identical clocks.

It does appear that the 6GB configurations do show some potential over a 3GB setup in both pure bandwidth and real world applications. Synthetic benchmarks like SuperPi also seem to have a bit of a liking for 3x2GB kits. This really is no surprise to us since Vista does like memory and it may be more of a byproduct of the OS and not so much the application. Let's now see how these setups compare in the gaming arena.