It is game time...well, not gaming time but 3DMark time and a little bit of gaming. History has shown little gains in performance when memory is the only difference but these results have a lot of CPU variance so we should have a bit of fluctuation in the numbers.

It appears that the tiny bit of bright light the DDR2 setup had in some of the previous benchmarks is all but gone in the 3DMark results. The stock timings/frequency of the Viper Extreme out-perform the DDR2 setup in all versions of the popular 3D benchmarking application except in 06 but the difference is covered by the margin for error from slight variations in one run to the next. The rest of the results aren't like the bandwidth numbers we saw because of the CPU difference. This was expected and played out to hold true.

Both Half-Life 2 and Crysis directly mimic what 3DMark says which is again, no surprise. We have seen on a number of occasions that system performance plays a very small role in gaming performance and this is again the case. With the video settings lowered as much as possible (1024x768 / detail settings on low / no AA no AF) and even a 500+ MHz difference in CPU frequency from the top to the bottom of the chart, we see only a 9 FPS difference in results in Crysis. Half-Life 2 offers more of a gap but that is because the Source engine tends to rely a lot more on system performance than other games and why we see such high FPS numbers across the board.

Overall there were not any major surprises in the benchmarks and everything shook out as one would expect. We will now wrap up this review with the conclusion and out final thoughts.