OCZ Blade 3x2GB PC3-17000 CL8 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.

Well that about sums up the difference in bandwidth between these setups, or should we say, lack of difference. With the exception of the 6-7-6 timing set, all of the setups are darn near equal. Variations in runs crossed over each other and these three setups are very similar. The biggest reason the 6-7-6 timing set has fallen behind is simply the CPU clocks are much lower than the other three.

Latency is a slightly different story but again, all results are within the same ballpark. The 8-9-8 timing set is actually a little bit slower as far as latency goes compared to the two CL7 setups. Looks like the memory bandwidth just was high enough to make up for the looser timings.

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.

Strangely enough, Sandra agrees with Everest. My word, what is the world coming to? Well, in all fairness to Everest, Sandra results look more "scripted" than Everest so I think Everest doesn't have to worry about being grouped in with Sandra just yet.

Like the Everest latency results, the Sandra latency picks up a slight hiccup in the 8-9-8 timing set indicating a lack of frequency difference between it and the CL7 setups to make up for the looser timings.

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.

And finally we can close the case on this one as Sciencemark backs up both the Everest and Sandra results with a virtual tie between the bottom three result sets. A mere five base clock separates the 7-7-6, 7-8-7, and 8-9-8 results and the bandwidth numbers show that with near identical numbers.