OCZ Blade 3x2GB PC3-17000 CL8 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.

What there lacked in a gap in memory bandwidth doesn't lack in SuperPi 32M. The 8-9-8 timing set pulls out a nice advantage by a solid 9 seconds over the two CL7 results. At these CPU clocks, that is rather substantial, further confirming that memory frequency owns 32M over timings...unless of course you can run the same frequency with tighter timings. Another factor is the higher uncore and CPU so the difference between the three timing sets isn't only from memory.

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.

PCMark showed a little more of a gap than we expected giving the 8-9-8 timing set a solid 4~5% higher score than the 7-8-7 timing set. What we also see is that the 7-7-6 timing set upset the 7-8-7 timing set with the 6-7-6 timing set extremely close behind.

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.

Moving away from the synthetics we can see that the real world results are pretty equally matched to the synthetic results we just looked at. DivX shows a 26 second gain going from the fastest CL7 result to the 8-9-8 timing set and this is primarily going to be influenced by the CPU clocks. On a 22 minute calculation, 26 seconds is a mere 2% gain in performance.

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 identical gaps between the results percentage wise from top to bottom. These benchmarks are really showing that bandwidth results can be a good indicator of performance in the real world. These are about the same patterns in results we saw in the first benchmarking section right through this entire system suite of benchmarks.

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.

The DriversHeaven Photoshop benchmark puts out somewhat erratic results at times but on the whole, the numbers fell in line for what we have seen so far. The slightly higher CPU clock and memory clock, regardless of memory timings, out performs the other setups.

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.

The last of our real world tests is WinRAR and the newest beta doesn't seem to much care about the rest of the benchmarks as it puts the bottom three results in a virtual tie. There is no way to mistake these results, they all perform the same.

We will now have a quick look at the gaming benchmarks before moving on to the real exciting benchmarks.