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So with every memory test that we do we try to do things a bit differently, today we'll not focus at all at overclocking and tweaking memory timings. We wanted to see how well the memory kit behaves when we place it in the PC and let the PC take it from there in. The memory has all optimal settings written in it's SPD and will make sure that when it sees a 400 MHz DDR frequency the best settings will be selected.

Next to that we'll compare the 2GB kit towards two 1GB kits, which obviously will be a bit faster and even two 512MB kits. Now the theory of seriously longer datapaths versus information packets being transported on a 2Gb kit definitely does apply as that huge amount of memory does take it's toll on latency. But is a 2GB kit with these timings capable enough for the hardcore gamers ?

Let's compare and find out .. first we'll run some synthetic tests at the memory to measure what we can expect from memory bandwidth. And then we'll continue along the path with some real world gaming performance with titles like Quake 4, Serious Sam 2, 3DMark and so on.

Sandra - Synthetic Tests
SiSoftware's Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software. Sandra provides similar level of information to Norton SI, Quarterdeck WinProbe/Manifest, etc. The Win32 version is 32-bit and comes in both ANSI (legacy for Windows 98/Me systems) and native Unicode (Windows NT4/200X/.Net) formats. The Win64 version is 64-bit and comes in native Unicode format.

Do note that all the SANDRA benchmarks are synthetic and thus may not tally with real-life performance. The latter stands for whatever your environment is, i.e. which applications you run with what amount of data and so on. It is up to you to decide whether what Sandra measures is what you want to measure.

• Download SANDRA (special Guru3D.com edition)

Below you can find the scores of Sandra starting with memory performance:

It will be quite difficult to understand what we present to you today. Interpreting data in the way we tested and what we can show you simply is hard to comprehend, especially with all the mathematic BIOS timings and dividers. Memory tweaking and overclocking is close to science. Let me try to explain a little how to interpret the chart.

From left to right you see the slowest to the fastest tested memory. Small sidenote, the Crucial kit all the way on the left is actually a 512 MB kit, I forgot to insert that info while doing the charts. All kits are dual channel ! All memory runs at the advertised DDR400 frequency and all setting are SPD based.

This basically means you insert it into your PC and let the PC read and the memory decide what timings to use (it reads it from the memory SPD). As you can see, subtle differences, but the differences are there alright. The Corsair 2GB kit is already mighty impressive !

PCMark 2005PCMark 05 is the latest version of the popular PCMark series. PCMark05 is an application-based benchmark and a premium tool for measuring overall PC performance. It uses portions of real applications instead of including very large applications or using specifically created code. This allows PCMark05 to be a smaller installation as well as to report very accurate results. As far as possible, PCMark05 uses public domain applications whose source code can be freely examined by any user. 

Info and download - Download!

With PCMark05 we can see the difference getting a little higher already, there's a 200 MB per second differential from the slowest to the fastest memory. Again the 2GB kit is second best at a very worthy position.

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.

Download

Everest is a tool that is growing slowly on me, so I decided to include the results. Synthetic numbers are simply 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 tests we achieve read bandwidth over 5800 MB/sec which is very efficient at this FSB frequency. In Everest the 2GB kit is actually on top. Write results are also fantastic.

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