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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darklight0tr - Wednesday, June 24, 2009 - link
You kinda lost me at the Windows 7 admission. Why use an unreleased OS that most of us don't have access to?Gary Key - Wednesday, June 24, 2009 - link
I debated about using Win7, but we have some interesting virtualization benches coming in a couple of weeks with XP mode running on it, both for these tests and looking at 12GB and 24GB loads.Also, memory management and several other performance metrics are just better under Win7 than Vista. I ran most of these tests under Vista 64 and the results (percentage wise) were the same as Win7. I also tried the latest RC version of Win7 (7232), no differences in performance. Not that I expected any as the core code for Win7 has been done for a while but it was to double check. I did not use 7232 since it is not "officially" available for the public. ;)
crimson117 - Wednesday, June 24, 2009 - link
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/downloa...">http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/downloa...There, now everyone here has access to it.
darklight0tr - Wednesday, June 24, 2009 - link
LOL. You got me there, my brain hadn't arrived at work yet when I posted that comment.Still, I don't see the point of replacing the released, established OS with an unreleased one. Testing on both would have made more sense if you wanted to do it that way.
philosofa - Wednesday, June 24, 2009 - link
I lol'd :) Nicely done.Re the article itself; fantastic and thorough work as always! Great to see the debate and various titbits of benching replaced by such a systematic multi-app examination of i7 memory speed & latency effects. Also, cheers for the analysis of min frame rates - this is something that's been on-and-off for a while now, and I, like a lot of others, agree that it's as least as important as average FPS.
Cheers Gary.
Matt Campbell - Wednesday, June 24, 2009 - link
Great job as always Gary, fantastic detail.aileen - Friday, July 3, 2009 - link
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