Mushkin Ascent 2x2GB PC3-12800 DDR3 Kit Review

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.

The first of our 'system' benchmarks is SPi 32M which is heavily dependent not only on memory bandwidth, but latency as well. In the end, the results speak volumes about what is important in 32M performance. Higher bandwidth and in this case, higher memory frequency, wins out with a steady drop in times from 800MHz up to 1000MHz. At these timing sets, it appears frequency is king and timings aren't playing much of an effect. With a little more clocks on the 7-7-7 timing set, however, these results would be singing a different tune.

The WinRAR benchmark is simply timed until the test reaches 500MBs of data. Compressing data with WinRAR is all about the memory and the results should reflect this. WinRAR is very sensitive to frequency and timings of memory and one of the highest influenced programs out there when it comes to memory performance.

Again, we see an almost perfectly even decline in times going from the lower frequency to the highest in the WinRAR benchmark. This may become a common theme because as we saw in bandwidth, the higher frequency timing set provided more bandwidth than the rest. This appears to be resulting in higher performance across the board, thus far.

Moving from some of the more 'synthetic' benchmarks, we find ourselves smack dab in the middle of a VOB to DivX encoding task. We will take a VOB rip of the vengeful anger in Falling Down, and convert it into DivX using the default 720P setting of the latest DivX converter v6.

Another real world test we like to run is a very common tasks home computers find themselves doing these days, converting DVDs to playable media content on the PC. As we can see from the results, the higher frequency memory continues to win outright, but the margin of victory is hardly something to write home about. The DivX conversion doesn't appear to use that much system memory so the results aren't that surprising. Perhaps we will look into some other programs for this sort of work going forward, just to see if memory plays a bigger role in any of them.

Adobe Photoshop CS3 is fully x64 compliant and ready and able to use every single CPU cycle our processor has available. Since digital photography is as popular as roller skates were in the 70's, we are going to be timing how long it takes to convert 100 RAW images from a Canon 20D into half size JPG files of maximum quality.

The last of the 'real world' testing we will conduct is in the popular design software, Photoshop CS3. Photoshop was not initially designed as a digital photo manipulator but it certainly has turned into one since the digital photography revolution of a few years back now. It just handles digital photos so well that it is hard to argue with its abilities. Much like the DivX conversion, we see a small advantage to higher memory clocks but the margins are very small. On a 2.1 minute batch job, we are only saving 7 seconds or so going from 800MHz at 6-6-5 to 1000MHz at 8-8-8. The sweet spot again seems to be the 7-7-7 timing set since it is running at slightly lower voltage than the other two.