PcMark 2005
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 memory scores which we got in PcMark are pretty impressive and the speed advantage of the RAM with the 1T command enabled is showing well with the memory score gaining another 550 points. We also run the graphics test suite in order to see how the RAM speed can affect gaming performance. There was a performance gain, but it was quite small despite the much better bandwidth of the RAM.
F.E.A.R. (1024x768)
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 5-15% increases we saw in the synthetic benchmarks as the RAM is not everything that a game relies on.
AutoGK (550MB VOB file, 75% video quality and AC3 audio encoding)
AutoGK is a simple but popular movie encoding application. It will help us see how the difference in synthetic benchmarks affects the real world performance of a system. We are encoding a 600MB DVD VOB file to an Xvid movie down to 75% the original video quality with AC3 audio. Lower encoding times are faster.
While the RAM timings do little to help in gaming performance, they severely aid CPU intensive applications. We found a performance increase of nearly 12% when encoding a DVD VOB file with AutoGK. 43 seconds faster encoding may not seem a significant increase, but to a person who encodes movies and/or music daily, such a performance increase would give large real world gains.
