Corsair Dominator GT 3x2GB PC3-15000 Triple Channel 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. Unfortunately with the i7 processors, the results aren't always consistent and we can receive variations as much as 1000MB/s at any given time. Because of this we use multiple runs and drop any of the "high" scores from the averages.

Aside from the absolutely ridiculous numbers that these triple channel kits put up with i7 processors, we see a pattern of lowest to highest that we expected. What we also get is a slight disparity between the 6GB and 3GB results of the same settings. Knowing Everest is not that precise with i7 processors, we will take it with a grain of salt at this point, but early on it looks like the 3x2GB kit has a bit of a bandwidth lead at the specified DDR3-1866 that these Dominator-GTs run at.

The latency results paint a similar picture as the bandwidth numbers. We have a steady drop in latency as the memory clocks go up, as well as too small a difference between the top two result sets. In fact, they both consistently came back with 44.6ns results in Everest.

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.

SiSoft Sandra repeats the bandwidth pattern of Everest from above but the differences are noticeably bigger. They are also uniform, very uniform results. Despite the fact that there may be some truth to the results, Sandra just always seems to present them in a neat and tidy package. Take the results for what they are worth.

The numbers are different, but the pattern is identical to Everest. Both programs clearly agree on latency amongst the various setups we tested here today.

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.

Probably my favorite memory bandwidth test, ScienceMark looks a lot like the Sandra bandwidth numbers. If we recall our last Dominator triple channel DDR3 review, this sounds quite familiar. The pattern appears to be that 3x2GB provides better bandwidth than 3x1GB, and higher clocks equates to higher bandwidth and lower latency. We really thought the 6-7-6 clocks might be close since the frequency was so high, but that clearly wasn't the case. Let's now see how these bandwidth numbers relate to some overall system benchmarks.