Mushkin Ascent 2x2GB PC3-12800 DDR3 Kit Review

Like PCMark, 3DMark is now into the Vantage stage. The most popular 3D benchmark series of all time was updated this year and we have finally gotten around to getting use to 3Dmark Vantage so it has beat out the spot of 3DMark 06 as the default 3DMark benchmark in memory reviews. It should be interesting to see how memory affects this benchmark. For now, we will simply rely on the Performance benchmark defaults for testing.

Moving into the 3D world of gaming and benchmarks we start off with 3DMark Vantage and guess what? We see almost the exact same pattern that we have been seeing throughout testing. Higher memory clocks result in slightly higher scores but with marginal differences. At least we have confirmed one thing, when at 500FSB, adjusting memory ratios to provide us with 800MHz, 900MHz, or 1000MHz memory frequencies; we lose no performance due to strap changes or some weird ratio performance issues. This is a good thing providing us with a wide range of possibilities when running this memory on the 790i platform.

Like all other benchmarks, Crysis is benchmarked with all patches and updates done to it. We use the popular Crysis benchmark tool running the Sphere level time demo at 1680x1050 with detail levels set to High in DX9 and 64-bit. This level has all the elements of the Crysis environment that make the game so great so we chose to use it as the level to run our benchmarks on.

The Crysis results are a bit inconclusive but if there is one thing we can pull from them, it’s that the tighter timings may actually help with higher minimum frame rates. This is of course just one level that we tested on but it appears to scale opposite to what we have seen thus far. Average frame rates across the board are all but identical though which again could be contributed to the level we benchmarked and not the system settings.

As with the Crysis benchmarking, UT3 was also benchmarked using a custom time demo, this time using a bot match comprised of 12 bots for 180 seconds on the Shangri-La level. All details levels are set to 5 at 1680x1050 resolution. The program used for the benchmarking can be found here. The results are somewhat erratic as we mentioned earlier so 10 runs of the benchmark are down and averaged out.

In wrapping up our benchmarks we turn to the old favorite UT3 to again throw some odd numbers out there despite our attempt to even them out by running the benchmark 10 times. The average frame rates amongst the 4GHz setups seems to be dead on as do the minimums but the maxes have one that really stands out. This is a result of just random bot matches and the fact that UT3 really is all over the board from one run to the next.

As a result of all of this testing, it would appear that the 7-7-7 timing set is the best bang for the buck since it performs almost as well as the 8-8-8 timing set and better than 6-6-5 but with slightly less voltage. Obviously every kit of this memory isn't going to clock identical to ours so when you get yours, be sure to do some testing and find the sweet spot that provides comparable performance with the least amount of voltage going to the memory and chipset.