Scaling Integrated Graphics Performance With High-End DDR3
We invited all of the major players in the retail memory business to participate in today’s evaluation of memory scaling across both desktop platforms with on-die graphics. The willing participants submitted samples ranging from a low-cost high-latency DDR3-1866 kit to high-cost low-latency DDR3-2400. We found that DDR3-2133 performed best on both AMD and Intel platforms, and Mushkin’s 997121R won the performance race by being latency-optimized at that data rate. It gets our most prestigious and rare Elite award for being the best product in its class.
Though exceptions exist for low-power computing, most enthusiasts would rather spend $70 on a discrete graphics card than an enthusiast-oriented memory kit to supplement the lackluster performance of an integrated GPU. Nevertheless, G.Skill has a solution for the folks who aren't ready to spend that much on either option. It'll give you half of the performance improvement for a quarter of the price increase, and that sounds like a smart value.
Our G.Skill samples were also highly tunable, reaching nearly identical performance to Mushkin’s high-end parts after we put a bunch of time into manually tweaking their settings. Anyone who achieves or surpasses our tuning efforts will especially find G.Skill’s DDR3-1866 CAS 10 a smart buy.
