G.Skill 2x1GB DDR3 PC3-12800 Review

We will call it the return of Crysis to the benchmarks results for the 3D section of this review. The reason being is the fact that we were blessed with a real video card for the G.Skill benchmarks and a real video card would possibly provide the system the ability to show some variance between results at lower settings. We really wanted t find out so we ran the benchmarks and have posted the results. First, however, we look at the 3DMark numbers from this beefier 8800GTS 512MB 3D setup.

Despite the increased graphics processing power, the 3DMark series of results remain about the same. The adjustments to tRD also appear to have very little effect on results, especially in 03, 05, and 06. 3DMark 01 does show some advantages to the higher frequency scores but even the difference between the spec'd G.Skill number and the DDR2 setup is less than 1%. If your benching 3DMark competitively then perhaps DDR3 is beneficial but for the casual gamer who uses 3DMark as a yardstick to compare their system to others, DDR3 just isn't going to have a large impact.

Would you look at that, an actual change in results in the built in Crysis GPU bench. All it took was an 8800GTS 512MB and turning the settings gown to 1024x768 with detail levels set to medium and no AA or AF. With that said, Crysis appears to give the advantage to the higher memory frequency amongst the results with the same CPU clocks. Half-Life 2 shows quite a bit more variation but that is because Half-Life 2 doesn't rely on the GPU nearly as much as Crysis.