Let the benchmarking games begin. As mentioned, we have the ability to adjust memory freely for the most part on the 790i based platform so we used this opportunity to get a direct head to head comparison between top clocks at 6-6-5, 7-6-5, and 8-7-6. Let's see how each timing set does in memory bandwidth and latency tests.

If we were to predict what the bandwidth results were going to look like, this is about what we would have expected. The Everest read numbers are just incredible easily breaking 13k on this motherboard and the write results are equally impressive. The reason for the almost identical write results with the overclocked settings is due to the fact that all red results are ran at the same FSB, and FSB on this system is obviously the only factor in write bandwidth.

With Science Mark and the PCMark 05 memory suite, we see a continuation of the bandwidth results with a slow steady increase in performance from top to bottom. So it is looking like even on the new NVIDIA 790i Ultra SLI chipset that memory frequency rules the roost, as far as bandwidth goes, much like is the case on the Intel P35 and X38 chipsets we have looked at in the past.

The last of the synthetic memory benchmarks are the latency results from Everest and SiSoft Sandra. Here is where we see our first "upset", if you will. The 7-6-5 timing set appears to be on par or slightly better than the 8-7-6 setup. I wouldn't call it a decisive victory but it certainly kept up to and equaled the higher frequency results. This combined with the bandwidth results may translate into something in the other benchmarks, let's find out.