OCZ Blade 3x2GB PC3-16000 CL7 Memory Review

Memory Benchmarks

Everest Ultimate is the most useful tool for any and all benchmarkers 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.

With the comparison setups we chose today, we should see a rather consistent progressive increase in memory bandwidth from top to bottom and that is the case with Everest Ultimate. The overclocked setup at 4.2GHz and DDR3-2000 with 7-7-6 timings really stands out. It isn't often we crack 25K in copy bandwidth in a review so it is already apparent that this kit is something special. Here are the latency results from Everest Ultimate.

As with the bandwidth, the latency results show a progressive decrease from top to bottom. This again is what we should be seeing based on the different setups tested. There is definitely a drastic difference between entry-level memory and high-end memory. The bandwidth and latency results are showing that. The real question will be how much of a difference that equates to in real life applications.

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 appears to agree with Everest Ultimate when discussing memory bandwidth. The higher clocked memory always trumps the lower clocked setup and higher CPU clocks enhance memory bandwidth even further. We may not like Sandra as a memory benchmark but in this case, the results are equal to that of the more trusted Everest.

The pattern continues as it should here in Sandra latency land. We didn't expect any different and are happy that we didn't have any results stand out that needed further investigation.

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.

The final word in memory bandwidth is ScienceMark and again, we reached a new level in bandwidth with this kit of memory and the 1000MHz 7-7-6 setup. This is the first time we cracked 20K in ScienceMark and are still impressed every time we run a benchmark with this memory at DDR3-2000 7-7-6. This will become very apparent a little later on when we really benchmark this memory. Consider these pages the warm up.

With Goliath clearly laying the boots to David in bandwidth testing, let's see how this performance advantage to higher clocks effects some synthetic and real world benchmarks aimed at overall system performance.