Intel Core i7 – Choosing the Best Memory Kit

[PAGETITLE=Introduction][Top Ad] With Intel's official Core i7 launch coming up within the next few weeks, the time to choose which parts you'll need for your new build is now. Whether or not you "need" an upgrade is going to be something only you can answer, but our in-depth preview from last week should be a good starting point. By the end, you should feel a lot more confident about your decision. In that article, we mentioned that there would be a few considerations you would have to bear in mind if considering an upgrade, or a brand-new build. One of the more important is memory. In the preview, I mentioned that it's best to upgrade to a memory kit that's designed for X58/Core i7, because previous DDR3 kits may have an issue with the new motherboards. It didn't take too long before I experienced this first-hand, but I did have a workaround. That was to boot up the machine with a kit I knew would work, manually change the voltages and timings, then swap back. After that, the PC booted fine. It goes without saying that this is not an ideal solution for most people, especially if you only have one DDR3 kit on hand. Nor is it much fun having to tweak every-single timing setting in order to have absolute stability. If money isn't a huge issue (and assuming you're upgrading to i7, it probably isn't), you may be better off opting for a special kit designed exclusively for the platform. That way, you can avoid any potential headaches, and know that you'll be installing a kit designed with this specific platform in mind. How Much and How Fast? In this brief article, we hope to answer that exact question. The answer will of course depend on personal needs, but I think for most people, what will be "required" is going to be about the same. If you run a workstation PC or a server, then you obviously want more memory than the average consumer, while the average consumer would likely prefer overall speed than density. Because Core i7 brings a triple-channel memory controller with it, purchasing a kit of RAM for the platform is going to be a very different experience compared to previous builds. The reason is simple... kits will include three sticks of memory, not two. This might seem like an odd-ball way of changing things, but as evidenced in last weeks article, triple-channel can mean huge bandwidth. Because recent PCs utilize a dual-channel memory controller, common practice was to purchase either a 2GB or 4GB kit, as odd numbers aren't possible with an even number of sticks (at least if you are dealing with even densities and are not mixing and matching), but that changes with i7. Instead of 2GB, 4GB or even 8GB kits, we'll be dealing with 3GB, 6GB and 12GB. The question comes down to "how much do I need?", and for the most part, this is actually quite easy to answer. The reason is because for most enthusiasts, the choice of 3GB is going to be eliminated right away. At this point in time, 3GB isn't a substantial amount of RAM, and most people have been using 4GB in their machines for the past year at least... so to actually downgrade would be an odd step to take. The major increase in bandwidth doesn't exactly counteract the lack of density, sadly. With today's games and high-end machines, 3GB can become very limiting, especially if you want to run Windows Vista alongside games at a resolution of above 1680x1050. Today, 4GB is almost a minimum, and even 3GB isn't going to be good enough. On i7 though, it's either 3GB or 6GB if you want your memory to be optimized... there's no in-between. The other option is to take the outrageous route and pick up 12GB, but that's going to be overkill for the vast majority of people. If you need that much RAM, then you'd likely know it without reading this article. Even intensive render jobs won't usually take advantage of more than 6GB, so I think that will be the most common configuration for most people. Memory frequencies also come into play, and this article will aim to figure out whether or not faster RAM is actually needed. After all, if Core i7 enables great latencies and insane bandwidth on lower-end kits, is there any reason to go with a "high-end" model? In previous generations, the benefits of having faster RAM was to both increase bandwidth and decrease latencies, and really, things don't change much with i7. Even before jumping into our results, it's safe to say that the lower latencies will make a far more important difference than increased bandwidth. Under no real circumstance can I see application performance differences on a PC with 20,000MB/s bandwidth compared to another with 30,000MB/s. Lower latencies equal faster transactions, and that's what's going to be important in real-world situations. Things could change in the server market, but this article is designed to take care of our number one type of visitor, the enthusiast. On the next page, we'll give a brief overview of our configurations and testing methodology, then jump right into benchmarking to see if that high-end kit you've had your eye on is really worth the money. [PAGEBREAK][PAGETITLE=Test System & Methodology, Benchmarks] At Techgage, we strive to make sure our results are as accurate as possible. Our testing is rigorous and time-consuming, but we feel the effort is worth it. In an attempt to leave no question unanswered, this page contains not only our testbed specifications, but also a fully-detailed look at how we conduct our testing. If there is a bit of information that we've omitted, or you wish to offer thoughts or suggest changes, please feel free to shoot us an e-mail or post in our forums. Test System. The table below lists the hardware for our two current machines, which remains unchanged throughout all testing, with the exception of the processor. Each CPU used for the sake of comparison is also listed here, along with the BIOS version of the motherboard used. In addition, each one of the URLs in this table can be clicked to view the respective review of that product, or if a review doesn't exist, you will be led to the product on the manufacturer's website. Component Core i7 Test System Processor Intel Core i7 Extreme 965 - Quad-Core, 3.20GHz, 1.30v Motherboard ASUS P6T Deluxe - X58-based, 2624 BIOS (10/23/08) Memory DDR3: Qimonda 3x1GB - DDR3-1066 7-7-7-20-1T, 1.56v DDR3: OCZ 3x2GB - Gold DDR3-1600 8-8-8-24-1T, 1.65v Graphics Palit Radeon HD 4870 512MB (Catalyst 8.9) Audio On-Board Audio Storage Intel X-25M 80GB SSD Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7200.11 Power Supply SilverStone DA1200 Chassis SilverStone TJ10 Full-Tower Display Gateway XHD3000 30" Cooling Thermalright TRUE Black 120 Et cetera Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit When preparing our testbeds for any type of performance testing, we follow these guidelines: General Guidelines No power-saving options are enabled in the motherboard's BIOS. Internet is disabled. No Virus Scanner or Firewall is installed. The OS is kept clean; no scrap files are left in between runs. Hard drives affected are defragged with Diskeeper 2008 prior to a fresh benchmarking run. Machine has proper airflow and the room temperature is 80°F (27°C) or less. Windows Vista Optimizations User Account Control (UAC) and screen saver are disabled. Windows Defender, Firewall, Security Center, Search, Sidebar and Updates are disabled. Memory Configurations. Because the ultimate goal of this article is to see how much of a real-world difference faster memory avails, we are running a total of five different configurations, four being with our OCZ 6GB kit. We vary the speeds from the very low-end speed of DDR3-800 to the high-end speed of DDR3-1600. We should note that DDR3-800 speeds are not going to be common amongst triple-channel kits, but we've included results to showcase the differences nonetheless. RAM Configurations OCZ Gold - 3x2GB - DDR3-800 6-6-6-15-1T, 1.60v. Qimonda - 3x1GB - DDR3-1066 7-7-7-20-1T, 1.65v. OCZ Gold - 3x2GB - DDR3-1066 7-7-7-20-1T, 1.65v. OCZ Gold - 3x2GB - DDR3-1333 7-7-7-20-1T, 1.65v. OCZ Gold - 3x2GB - DDR3-1600 8-8-8-24-1T, 1.65v. Most of the same benchmarks we used in our Core i7 preview article return here, with the exception of our two games. To take the place of the games, we use 3DMark Vantage, which is more than intense enough to show us where a bottleneck may lie. For detailed explanations on the tests themselves, please refer to our Core i7 preview. With that all said, let's jump right into a few of our real-world tests. 3D Renderers. One crowd that can appreciate a faster processor is without question, the 3D designers. But given their rendering projects can be so large, can faster memory shave minutes or even hours off of the task? Although our render jobs are nowhere near as complex as what you'd find in a professional studio, any benefits seen here should carry over even more so into larger projects. Sadly, from what we can see below, the gains are very, very minor. Our fast DDR3-1600 kit managed to take the top spot in all three of our rendering benchmarks, but the overall improvements are minimal at best. All of the increases seen were between 1% - 1.5%, which isn't going to add up to much in the real-world, unless you are dealing with jobs that can take a few days. Even then, the differences are going to be an minutes, not hours. Video Encoding & Image Manipulation. We know now that 3D designers aren't going to see major improvements with faster memory, but how about the video gurus? Our three tests below had the job of finding out, and again, the differences we found were absolutely minute, although they were a bit better than what we saw above. The test that showed off the biggest increase was ProShow Gold, which actually scales with RAM speed... something I wasn't expecting. With small projects, like our DVD encode, the increases are incredibly small, but with larger projects, like our HD Video Encode, the real differences begin to be seen. The real gain in a scenario like this would be small, but things would change...

Intel Core i7 – Choosing the Best Memory Kit

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Rob Williams