OCZ Blade 3x2GB PC3-16000 CL7 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.

Here is where memory starts to flex its muscle. SuperPi 32M loves memory bandwidth and naturally, performs better with higher clocks and tighter timings. It is no wonder we were able to shave 11 seconds off the DDR3-1600 time and over 22 seconds off the DDR3-1333 result simply by running the OCZ Blade memory at its stock settings. This benchmark does not correlate to every day system use, but SuperPi 32M is an institution in the benchmarking and overclocking community. Memory like the OCZ Blade PC3-16000 is an almost must have to really push SuperPi 32M these days. This will become absolutely apparent in the last section of our review today, the extreme benchmarking and overclocking section.

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.

To illustrate our point about memory performance not really relating to real world performance, we will use the PCMark Vantage memory results. The difference in score from our DDR3-1428 results to the DDR3-2000 7-8-7 results is only 4%. This is a very small variation considering the prices of the various types of memory kits involved. Of course, PCMark is just a synthetic benchmark and the validity of its results as a real world representative is easily questioned, but we have some more benchmarks coming up that are as real world as it gets. So we will find out just how close this 4% gain in performance in PCMark Vantage is to the real world.

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.

Okay, first up in the "real world" results is the DivX conversion from DVD VOB files to a 720P DivX movie. And would you look at that, a 5.11% gain going from our slowest memory to the fastest memory of the three setups running at 3.3GHz. This is very close to the 4% gain in performance seen in PCMark Vantage. It looks like the PCMark Vantage memory suite may be a good judge of character after all.

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.

Apparently MP3 encoding doesn't even come close to filling the potential memory bandwidth of Core i7 and the X58 chipset. We have basically identical results right down the board, until of course we increase CPU clocks dramatically.

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.

Here we got a bit of a surprise as we were sure Photoshop would show the same 4-5% increase in performance for the higher clocked memory. In reality the overall time shows only a 1.3% gain in performance which is all but negligible. We have to mention that this test involves 15 separate tasks and on most of them the gains were marginal, but a few tasks show much higher performance gains with the higher clocked memory. It appears that only on certain tasks in Photoshop does memory performance equate to actual performance. With that said, not a single task showed more than a 7% gain in performance between the three equal CPU clocked systems.

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.

Our biggest performance increase from higher clocked memory comes from the last system benchmark that we are looking at today. The overall performance gain in WinRAR comes out to over 11% going from the lowest memory clocks to the highest. Further gains are obviously had by the higher CPU clocked setup but amongst the first three result sets, we can see that WinRAR compression heavily relies on memory performance.

Today's benchmarks were not so much about the OCZ Blade memory we are reviewing today, but more about general memory performance. We learned some things today and also found that memory performance may or may not improve the performance of everyday tasks. There is still a few results to look at so let's get those out of the way, then we can summarize what we have seen.