DDR3 Memory: What Makes Performance Better?

Comparative Analysis

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Anyone who has glanced at the numbers can pretty much do an "analysis" on their own. Yes, we all know the Intel 4770K is a stronger CPU, both in single-threaded as well as multi-threaded operations. And that, in and of itself, leads to higher scores in Geekbench and plays in with all the benchmarks. I believe the big telling difference, though, is in the memory controller within the CPUs. What we see with the AMD CPU is older technology that is more oriented to lower frequencies and less total DRAM. I, for one, hope that the next generation of CPUs will use the advances the company has made and implemented in its newer APUs, which seem to like higher-frequency DRAM and handle it well. Intel handles the DRAM at lower latency and provides far higher reads and writes.

I could go into a detailed comparative analysis of the different numbers, but that isn't really the point of this. Rather, the point is primarily to give you an idea of what you can expect from either platform as far as DRAM, and why — if you are using one platform or the other — there are large differences in the numbers you will see when running benchmarks, and why it takes longer to perform an equivalent task on an AMD rig than on an Intel one.

You also can get an idea of how higher-frequency DRAM can show an increase in productivity on either platform when jumping from, say, 1600 to 2400, or moving up from 8GB to 16GB to 32GB of DRAM. To that end, the gains shown above may appear small, so I also ran a few tests on the sets that aren't on any list of benchmarks available.

I'm not a big fan of most benchmarks, in large part because most of them don't really use the DRAM. In other words, there are lots of gaming benchmarks available, but most gaming is centered entirely on the CPU or the GPU, and DRAM isn't much more than a conduit for data to flow through. I've long said that having more higher-frequency DRAM tends to show the strength of it more when multitasking or using memory-intensive applications. Earlier, I used WinRAR as a benchmark to provide examples of changes between 2400 and 1600 DRAM, as well as in different amounts (8GB, 16GB and 32GB) at 2400. As I expected, the completion time took longer with the lower frequency of 1600 using 32GB, as well as when using smaller amounts of DRAM. Taking it a step further, though not something one can truly and fully quantify, I experimented with running multiple applications and then running WinRAR to compress the same file used earlier. The "simulation" consisted of opening 10 tabs in Chrome to a page that changes, running a Malware Bytes scan and running Geekbench along with WinRAR. I came up with these numbers (again, it's the average of the mid three of five tests) on the Intel system"

When multitasking, you can see even bigger gains with the additional DRAM.