Memory Scaling on Core i7 - Is DDR3-1066 Really the Best Choice?
by Gary Key on June 24, 2009 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Memory
The Rest of the Story: Applications that Don't Care About Memory Performance
Not everything is as impressive as the past two pages of results, the following applications show little or no performance improvement regardless of memory speed or timings.
Sorenson Squeeze 5.01
We are using Sorenson Squeeze to convert eight AVCHD videos into HD Flash videos for use on websites.
Performance levels off once we hit DDR3-1333 C8 with a 2% improvement compared to 1066 C7.
MainConcept Reference 1.61
One of our favorite video transcoding utilities is MainConcept Reference. We set our profile to iPOD HQ NTSC and then transcode a 651MB 1080P file to a iPOD friendly 34.7MB file.
Improvements in memory bandwidth resulted in an almost 3% increase in performance when moving from 1066 C7 to 1600 C6.
Sony Vegas Pro 9.0 x64
We transcode a 370MB 1080AVCHD file using the Mainconcept MPEG-2 1920x1080 60i, 25Mbps setting with 6-channel audio.
There is a 2% improvement in moving from DDR3-1066 to DDR3-1866 in this application.
CyberLink PowerDirector v7
We transcode a 651MB 1080P file utilizing the 720x480 MPEG-4 AVCHD 6-channel audio setting while performing a Light Ray effect on the output file.
Except for the 1333 C9/C8 results, performance remains flat from 1066 C7 to 1866 C7 as your choice of memory speed is not going to really affect this particular application.
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Seikent - Wednesday, June 24, 2009 - link
I'm not very sure if it's relevant, but I missed a load times comparation. I know that the bottleneck there should be the hdd, but I still think that there can be a performance boost.deputc26 - Wednesday, June 24, 2009 - link
ave and min lines are mixed up.MadBoris - Wednesday, June 24, 2009 - link
I'll be considering upgrading in October at the same time I go from XP to Win 7.So this is good to know if/when I go Core I7.
I guess I can see how Winrar RAM workload sdtays high since it grabs the buffers of compressed data chunks and writes them to disk as fast as the HW permits, so bandwidth matters then.
While it looks like very few apps can saturate the bandwidth latency benefits/penalties are always having an effect as usual.
Maybe I missed it but I didn't see anywhere in the article that tried to explain the technical reasons "why" 2000 doesn't provide advantage over 1066.
I understand the differences of latency and bandwidth. Is it really because no software is using RAM workloads large enough to benefit from increased bandwidth (except compression) or is there another bottleneck in the subsystem or CPU that doesn't allow moving all the data the RAM is capable of?
vol7ron - Wednesday, June 24, 2009 - link
Your question is long, so i didn't read it all, but does bottom of pg2 answer:"That brings us to another story. We had planned to incorporate a full overclocking section in this article but our DDR3-1866 and DDR3-2000 kits based on the Elpida DJ1108BASE, err Hyper ICs, have been experiencing technical difficulties as of late."
They said some other stuff, but it seems like it wouldn't be right to post info on faulty chips.
TA152H - Wednesday, June 24, 2009 - link
I'd like to see a test between the crippled i5 memory controller with very fast memory, and the i7 with low cost 1333 Mhz memory. There's really no point in the 1066 memory, except for Dell, HP, etc... to throw in generic machines; it's not much cheaper than 1333 MHz, and the performance bump really seems to be biggest there. I think 1333 MHz (low latency) is a reasonable starting point for most people, the cost seems to warrant the performance. After that, you definitely see diminishing returns.It seems anyone buying an i5 with very expensive memory is probably a fool, but, a few benchmarks might be interesting to validate or invalidate that. Of course, the i5 might be better when released, so even then it wouldn't be proof.
Gary Key - Wednesday, June 24, 2009 - link
I wish I could show i5 numbers, but that ability is officially locked down now. I can say that our results today will not be that much different when i5 launches, low latency 1333 or possibly 1600 will satisfy just about everyone. :)strikeback03 - Thursday, June 25, 2009 - link
Of course, by the time you can share those numbers we will most likely have to specify whether we are talking about LGA-1366 i7 or LGA-1156 i7. Thanks Intel.kaoken - Wednesday, June 24, 2009 - link
I think there is a mistake with the farcry graph. The min and avg lines should be switched.hob196 - Thursday, June 25, 2009 - link
Looking closer it might be that you have the SLI min on there instead of the Non SLI min.halcyon - Wednesday, June 24, 2009 - link
It's so nice to see AT calling things as they are.This is why we come here.
Straight up honest talk from adults to adults, with very little marketing speech and numbers do most of the talking.
Excellent test round up, mucho kudos.