Mushkin Redline Ascent 3x2GB PC3-12800 C6 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.

Well look what we have here, a solid 7 second drop going from DDR3-1736 6-7-6 to DDR3-1924 6-8-6. We were expecting those two setups to be neck and neck through 32M but it turns out that tRCD of 8 didn't hurt performance as much as we expected and the higher memory clocks cleaned the floor of the 6-7-6 setup. We can also see that the lower CPU clock of 3600MHz didn't hold back the DDR3-2000 8-9-8 result that much. It still managed to come within a whisker of the 6-7-6 setup, well maybe not a whisker, but two seconds isn't too bad considering it was almost 50MHz slower on CPU clocks.

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 memory benchmark suite which involves a wide range of tests on primarily associated with media management and testing.

This was the first time we ran the memory suite in PCMark Vantage. Normally we run the standard full suite but figured, this is memory we are testing, why not just test the memory? The results really don't mean too much too us aside from the fact that the test likes memory frequency. We see a pattern of results very similar to that of SiSoft Sandra bandwidth.

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.

Obviously CPU clocks mean more in DivX encoding than memory frequency. Our last setup at DDR3-2000 gets beat pretty badly by the two CL6 setups, and it is obviously from the lower CPU frequency. The higher memory frequency of the 6-8-6 setup did manage to gain 17 seconds over the 6-7-6 setup, but that is 17 seconds over the course of a 21 minute task which equates to about a 1.4% gain in performance. If you are doing a lot of DivX encoding, don't look at memory frequency for performance gains.

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.

Lame Front End shows less gains from higher memory frequency than DivX encoding did. Our two CL6 setups are a dead heat, and the DDR3-2000 setup again falls a couple seconds off the pace, because of the lower CPU clock.

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.

We all know what WinRAR is and does. It is a compression and decompression tool that has a built in benchmark, a way to tell just how fast a system can do this programs given task. We simply run the benchmark up to 500MB processed and time how long it takes.

These last couple of benchmarks are showing the same exact pattern that we saw in SPi 32M as well as DivX and Lame Front End. In most if not all of the real world benchmarks, CPU frequency just plays more of a role than memory clocks or timings. Sure the higher frequency of memory helps, but it can't even make up for a 50MHz difference in CPU frequency. We can also see that tighter timings really don't take much to overcome with memory frequency on the i7 platform.

The setups we looked at today were definitely interesting for us, and they also provided some valuable information that we haven't seen before. I mean, we have seen the same type of factors influence results, but these setups gave us another perspective to them. Overall, we are quite pleased with how things turned out and pleased with our choice in configurations to compare.