Everest Ultimate Edition

1600MHz 8-8-8-24

Copy

Latency

Read

Write

 

1600MHz 7-6-6-18

Copy

Latency

Read

Write

 

1780MHz 8-8-8-24

Copy

Latency

Read

Write

Everest is also a very popular synthetic benchmark. Despite its similarities with Sandra, Everest is running very simple tests and provides different results which are close to the maximum possible theoretical speed of the system. Higher read, write and copy speeds are better but lower latency readings are better.

Since Everest is a pure synthetic benchmark, it is easily affected by the timings of the RAM on the read test but mainly by the CPU and FSB speeds on the write test, which explains the vast speed increase on the read test when we run the RAM at lower timings but we received no increase at all in the write test. The copy test is affected by both, explaining the small performance increase.

 

PC Mark 2005

	Memory Score
1600MHz 8-8-8-24 1T	7089
1600MHz 7-6-6-18 1T	7306
1600MHz 8-8-8-24 2T	7988

PcMark software was developed by FutureMark in an effort to create a benchmark able to test all of the basic components of a system. We ran the memory and graphics benchmarks 3 times each and note the average score of the 3 runs. Higher scores are better.

The Crucial Ballistix gave us a good performance score at stock speed and timings, which got only better when we set the timings tighter. The true performance increase came from overclocking the RAM further, as the higher FSB speed considerably aids the real-world performance of the RAM.

 

F.E.A.R (800x600)

	Min FPS	Avg FPS	Max FPS
1600MHz 8-8-8-24 1T	83	160	377
1600MHz 7-6-6-18 1T	84	161	387
1600MHz 8-8-8-24 2T	87	167	387

Since PcMark is still a synthetic benchmark we also added a popular game in our benchmarking queue. F.E.A.R. was our choice as it is still a very popular FPS game with high requirements and an integrated benchmark. 

Despite the RAM running at the same MHz speed, the tighter timings still improved the gaming performance of our system by a few FPS. The performance gain however is certainly not equivalent of the 5-8% increases we saw in the synthetic benchmarks as the RAM is not everything that a game relies on. The noteworthy performance increase came from overclocking the RAM at 1780MHz, which led to higher FSB and CPU speeds as well.