ASUS Rampage II Gene mATX LGA1366 Motherboard 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.

We have a bit of a cut and dry comparison in today's benchmarks. On one hand we have a stock system with a typical PC3-12800 8-8-8 3x2GB kit of memory, and on the other, an aggressively overclocked system with performance memory. The Everest bandwidth results really do show how much of a performance difference overclocking the system can bring, to memory bandwidth anyway. It will be interesting to see how much of a performance difference this equates to in the real world bench marks.

As with bandwidth, memory latency also drops drastically with the overclocked system. Processor speed also helps memory latency so we are not simply looking at the difference between DDR3-1600 8-8-8 and DDR3-1800 7-8-7.

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 bandwidth results mimic those of Everest Ultimate. Despite the difference in measurement, Sandra and Everest both show just over 11% gains in bandwidth between the two setups.

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.

ScienceMark also reports substantially higher bandwidth for the overclocked setup but it is up over the 14% range for an increase. This is a good bit higher than Everest and Sandra showed for bandwidth gains.