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Everest Home Edition
EVEREST Home Edition is a freeware hardware diagnostics and memory benchmarking solution for home PC users.

It offers accurate hardware information and diagnostics capabilities, including online features, memory benchmarks, hardware monitoring, and low-level hardware information. EVEREST Home Edition is optimized for Microsoft Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 operating systems, and it fully supports the XP look & feel.
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Everest is a tool that is growing slowly on me, so I decided to include the results. Synthetic numbers simply are the best way to show you the exact difference between timings and frequencies. Something that is very hard to show with games.

Charming and rather accurate reports are offered by this little benchmark suite especially for memory in this tool. Here we can see bandwidth grow once we alter all the goodness. As you can see with all three synthetic test we achieve read bandwidth over 8000 MB/sec.

Let's run a game and launch the same methodology used at it to see if we can perceive a performance difference.

Doom 3

At the 2002 E3 exhibit ID Software showed of DOOM 3. Days after that the world was shocked as somehow that demo got leaked onto the Internet. It's now 2004 and the game has finally been released! The breathtaking realism of the Doom III engine basically depends on two features; a realistic physics engine and a unified lighting scheme that incorporates detailed bump-mapping and volumetric shadows. Hardware older than GeForce 4/3 lack the flexibility and power to run Doom 3 with detailed features at an acceptable frame-rate. The engine is once again written in OpenGL.

DOOM 3 sports a brand spanking new game engine that's a marvel to see. The amount of special effects that master programmer John Carmack has whipped up show us environments that we've heard about but have never seen before. ID has made an engine that specializes around the type of game they made: dark, scary, and intense. The game takes place on a base on Mars in the year 2145. The environments will give you a feeling of claustrophobia, which is only heightened by the game's dark atmosphere. Every light in the game is cast by some actual light source somewhere. If there's no lights on in the room, you'll see literally nothing and will need to turn on a flashlight. Shoot out a light in the middle of a battle, and you'll need to fight blindly. Sometimes, graphics do truly contribute to atmosphere as well as gameplay and with DOOM 3 it's obvious that id understands this better than most game developers.

In a weird way it's almost impossible to fully describe what the game looks like, but needless to say its well beyond anything to date. Multi colored per-pixel lighting on bump-mapped surfaces. Each and every object in the game, including the teeth of the monsters you fight cast dynamic shadows, but not the jagged kind you mayve seen in other recent games. The shadows are done using Carmacks own algorithm. Im sure many of you have upgraded specifically for this game, but it appears as though the video card is by far the most important piece of hardware needed. With a card like Geforce 6800 Ultra you can run the game at insane resolutions with huge amounts of detail (something I thoroughly enjoyed), but even at the lowest resolution with the lowest amount of detail it looks jawbreaking.

At higher resolutions clearly we see a graphics card and CPU bottleneck so we stick at 1024x768. Focus on overall scores. As you can see the score pretty much remains the same in the 533 - 600 MHz frequency tact. Once we fire off the 285+ FSB at the game the CPU of course will deliver more power and combined with that high bandwidth we see a massive performance increase of roughly 10%.

Now this doesn't work for all games though, yet we can demonstrate you by this method the overall effect of a nice tweak.

3DMark03

The latest in the 3DMark benchmark series built by Futuremark Corporation (formerly known as MadOnion.com). More than 5 million benchmark results have been submitted to Futuremarks Online ResultBrowser database. It has become a point of great prestige to be the holder of the highest 3DMark score. A compelling, easy-to-use interface has made 3DMark very popular among game enthusiasts. Futuremarks latest benchmark, 3DMark03, continues this tradition by providing a Microsoft DirectX 9 benchmark.

The introduction of DirectX 9 and new hardware shader technologies puts a lot of power in the hands of game developers. Increasingly realistic 3D games will be available over the next year and a half. The use of 3D graphics will become more accessible to other applications areas and even operating systems. In this new environment, 3DMark03 will serve as a tool for benchmarking 3D graphics.

I wanted to show you the bandwidth effects withs synthetic gaming software in the form of the 3DMark series. The software runs the reference test run from FutureMark with all options set to default. As you can see memory does make a really slight difference in '03 with a ~300 point differential when optimally tweaked.

BTW you can download all this software for free in the Guru3D.com download sections.