Mushkin Ascent 2x2GB PC3-12800 DDR3 Kit Review

Everest Ultimate is the most useful tool for any and all memory tweaking. Everest will reliably measure memory bandwidth of the system as well as latency. With this information, one can discover what is and is not improving bandwidth when tweaking or even just trying various timing and frequency combinations.

We start off with our look at memory bandwidth numbers for the various setups and we can immediately see a pattern forming. The last three results (blue and red) are going to be the primary focus of discussion since they are all ran at the same FSB and CPU frequency. The only differences are the memory timings and speed between them giving us a fairly direct comparison. We get an even climb in memory read speeds here in Everest going from the lowest to highest memory frequency. This is expected and shows that we shouldn't be dealing with any memory ratio issues that we saw in the last memory review we did on the 790i chipset where results were all over the place.

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.

Our ScienceMark bandwidth results come close to repeating Everest but the 900MHz and 1000MHz timing sets appear to be dead even, with 900MHz showing a slight advantage even. This was a little un-expected because we really had to fight with the 7-7-7 timing set in order to get it stable over 900MHz and the secondary timings are quite loose. Obviously, this doesn't have a huge effect on the bandwidth.

The latest in a long line of system benchmarking utilities, PCMark Vantage has quite the heritage and following in the overclocking and benchmarking community. For this memory review, we will simply be utilizing the memory benchmark portion of the software.

The PC Mark Vantage memory suite provides similar results that we saw with Everest and a gradual climb in performance as the frequency rises. The score that PC Mark comes up with is based on a number of memory bandwidth and latency tests it conducts and further confirms that we have a heck of a fight on our hands with these timing sets. Let's see what the Everest latency test provides for these timing sets now.

Again, Everest Ultimate to the rescue in measuring memory latency. Like bandwidth, measuring latency can give us some insight into how the whole memory sub-system is performing.

What is intriguing with these results is that all three of the last timing sets are very close, but the CL7 timing set seems to fall a little bit behind. This is what we were kind of expecting as secondary timings appear to have more effect on latency than they do bandwidth, or at least Everest seems to think so. Let's now move on to some more benchmarks that revolve around system speed with a heavy influence from memory performance.