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Test
System:
ABIT
AI7 (865PE) Motherboard
Crucial
Radeon X800 Pro
Intel
P4 2.4c
Western
Digital WD80JB Hard Drive
ScienceMark
2:::...
One
of my favourite benchmarks, ScienceMark offers a variety
of scientific benchmarks with wonderful names like "Primordia",
but on this occasion we're only interested in the memory
testing module.
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ScienceMark
2
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In
terms of overall bandwidth ScienceMark gives the advantage
to Corsair, though not by a huge margin.
ScienceMark
Overall Throughput
The
other result from ScienceMark looks at latencies from using
various data "strides". What this does in simple
terms is rather than accessing data from adjacent memory
locations, it leaves a gap of varying size between locations
to see how this affects performance.
If
you imagine you're in a supermarket and have to collect
three items from an aisle, it would obviously be easy if
all three items were located next to each other on the shelves.
What this test does is place the items at varying distances
apart along the isle so you have to actually push your trolley
to get to them.
In
reality it's unlikely that required data will be stored
conveniently in successive addresses so these results are
reasonably indicative of real-world performance. In the
graph below smaller numbers indicate lower latencies and
thus better performance.
ScienceMark
Latencies
As
expected a 4 byte stride is significantly faster than a
512 byte stride. Corsair's 3200XL Pro does a magnificent
job at 256 bytes but GeIL beat it out at the larger 512
byte level. The Corsair also does unusually badly at 64
bytes suggesting it is clearly optimised for operation under
certain defined situations.
+++
SiSoft
Sandra 2004:::...
Next
we turn to probably the most used benchmark around, SiSoft's
excellent Sandra 2004. On this occasion we've only run the
basic memory bandwidth module.
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SiSoft
Sandra Memory Bandwidth
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Once
more we see a small, almost negligible performance advantage
to Corsair's 3200XL Pro for integer performance which is
in keeping with the ScienceMark results. The GeIL memory
however takes the lead for floating point performance. I
mentioned in a recent roundup that memory benchmarks are
designed to highlight even the smallest of performance variations
and I'd challenge anyone to notice the differences in real
world usage.
Still,
performance variations are whet we're looking for and on
this occasion GeIL finish second if we factor in both scores.
Bandwidth
- Higher is Better
Most
interesting is that all GeIL's modules offer better floating
point performance than they do integer while OCZ and Corsair
are the opposite way around.
+++
PCMark04:::...
Needless
to say this comes from Fururemark, who if you don't know
are the guys behind the omnipresent 3DMark benchmark. Only
the memory tests were run on this occasion.
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PCMarks
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A
familiar tale as the GeIL is beaten out by Corsair's 3200XL
Pro, though again the margin is small, just not quite small
enough to put down to error.
For
some reason I accidentally left in the results from Crucial's
mainstream DDR400 but that gives you a rough idea how much
of an advantage we see from both GeIL and Corsair's low
latency parts.
PCMark04
Score - Higher is Better
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