Performance - SANDRA Memory
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.
Below you can find the scores of Sandra starting with memory performance:
It is really difficult to understand what we present to you. 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.
You'll notice the 6 GB kit memory at ranges from 1333 MHz up-to a pretty wicked reaching level of an overclocked 2000 MHz.
To scale and compare a little to the competition we inserted a low-latency 3GB 1333 MHz kit from OCZ and then the recently tested 6GB G.Skill 1600 MHz memory. I also included results of Corsairs kit yet then clocked at 1333 MHz + JEDEC timings. mind you, you can set these timings lower yourself (tweak it a little) and you'll easily match that OCZ memory).
As you can see the Dominator memory is showing dominating performance. We opted to set CAS latency at 8-9-9-24 / 1.65V. it works 100% stable. Also we'll include overclocked results at 2000 MHz throughout the review.
Triple versus Dual-channel memory.
We've been talking about triple channel memory configurations a lot. This doesn't mean that 2 DIMMs wouldn't work in dual-channel configuration on a Core i7 platform, no Sir. So please understand this:
- you are not forced to a triple channel configuration. You can insert 2 sticks of memory as well, yet it would be configured in dual-channel mode.
The downside here is that you'll loose a third of your memory performance. However, since the memory isn't tied to the good old FSB anymore, a dual-channel memory configuration also reaps the fruits of the labor that is called the Core i7 processor memory controller.
We've been asked a couple of times if we where able to show you the differences, and surely we'll do so with a couple of benchmarks. Here we go, and again we'll show you the difference throughout the review.
Notorious memory ... this of course is a synthetic test, designed to show you the performance difference among components. None the less, it speaks for itself.
