The second part of this article series deals with the differences between single and dual channel memory, and the performance benefits of using RAID with two or even four hard drives.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/1 [...] index.html

It would've been interesting to see if the older Pentium 4s and Pentium Ds profit from Dual Channel. Overall an interesting article though. I wasn't surprised by the results though, since the core 2 architecture is quite resistant against bad memory.

The funny part is, i just bought a new mainboard to replace my old one so i can run my memory in dual channel AND have access to an RAID 0 controller to get a RAID going.

I wonder if the lack of increased throughput going from 2 to 4 drives is due to a limitation of the onboard RAID controller.

I'm confused. So having a raid setup for speed doesnt affect gaming much at all? My friend has a raid 5 and boasts that his games will load faster than people with a single hard drive. Is this still true? From those bar graphs it doesnt look like it.

Is there a part 3, to this? I always thought parallel processing has to do with either multi-threaded application performance using several processors to crunch the info down at once or large scale multi-processor platforms doing huge number crunching like a server render farm.....???

@wirelessfender: Yeah, I was wondering the same thing, all they did was run benchmarks. The fact there is little or no advantage (to RAID) as far as FPS in games goes, is not surprizing to me. But the real benefit is supposed to be load times, etc. Why didn't the author perform some good old stopwatch benchmarks for the setup (load times, file transfers, encoding, etc)?

The thing I'm really surprized about is that the dual channel memory had little effect. I would have thought this change should have a perceivable performance increase (5-10%, nothing huge). I wonder how running these tests on an AMD platform would have come out (because of the IMC, and lack of FSB). Or if they have lowered the multiplier and increased the FSB to run 1:1 at DDR667 or DDR800 but kept the operating frequency the same. I've heard all around that running ram on an Intel platform above 1:1 has VERY little effect on the performance (even in the synthetics). It could've even been educational to run the ram at DDR533 single-and-dual-channel and stock for the proc to see how that comes out. Somewhat of an unscientific approach to the question. A single control with multiple trials would have provided a better overall picture of hard drive and memory parallelism.

Load times are faster

But once its in ram its all up to the video card and cpu(and slightly to the sound card)

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The memory is surprising to say the least.

My friend when running single channel has some serious reload to desktop times after some games(ETQW demo). This may have been due to half the memory(was not like that in dual...). but i am willing to bet there is also a memory speed thing there. unfortunately the memory was also found later to be not 100% compatible with the board....

Good stuff to know.

This article didn't prove that RAID makes no difference, it just showed that in games it won't increase frame rates (honestly, who thought it would?). There are tangible gains in the encoding segments, remember that a typical encode takes 2-4 hours, and they tested for 90 seconds, a 3-5% gain in speeds is somewhat meaningful, and capturing via IEEE1394 (esp HD content) will require a faster storage option, such as RAID.

That said, what they didn't show is if RAID makes Windows load faster or if it makes files copy quicker. I'm constantly working with 4-10GB files and moving those around on a single drive would suck. Like my sig says, I have RAID10 & RAID5 arrays. I can tell the difference, Vista benchmarked the RAID10 array at 130MB/s write (you can access the XML file for the vista index and get this data), something no single drive can do.

Basically, RAID won't make your applications run faster (except for a few rare ones, mainly video based), but should make them load faster. THG could test this if they cared to, but we've seen graphs of performance in terms of throughput, it would just duplicate these results.

joex444 - no exactly correct. It makes sequential transfers faster. A lot of game loading requires decompressing textures, etc. and so RAID0 offers marginal benefits to gamers. There have been benchmarks done to prove that. Same for start-up.

File copying and media work absolutely do benefit; however, it is amazing that media work performance increase is, again, marginal.

File serving is where RAID shines, particularly with a good controller. And other application such as file moving, but that is hardly a very common operation.

The benchmark selection for RAID was, indeed, curious.

One or both of two things are likely:
1) He is simply perceiving it as faster because he knows he has RAID
2) (and this is the more likely one) he is not comparing apples to apples - there are other factors interfering. Such as faster drivers in the first place hooked up to RAID. Maybe better file arrangement on the drive, etc.

yeah, at least they made partial headway into benchmarking performance for games and raid 0... framerate comparisons werent quite what i was hoping for, but its at least better than many of the synthetic benchmarks that used to be only run for the most part, which often dont correlate very well for practical uses. they could have made a fairly large impact on their readerbase possibly, if they had chosen to benchmark load times instead, for a variety of different games even, instead of the nearly pointless fps comparisons.

I think it would have been nice to have benchmarks done with 4 drive RAID 5 as well because I don't think many of us would actually use a 4 drive RAID 0. I say this because I'm sort of considering a RAID 5 for my next build. I know that in the server world its a big help but I was wondering more about normal desktop performance.

-mcg

hmm i would love to see a load time bench in games, i think the load would be a much more fair bench than testing FPS since it hardly matters what drive you got for FPS.

So where are the AMD dual channel results? It is likely it will be a bigger impact

Why are there no multiprocessing tests, like running a virus sweep while while doing something else? What about batch processing files in Photoshop?

We need to see tests that actually involve HD access and multiple threads, where some threads are accessing the HD.