Super Talent & TEAM: DDR3-1600 Is Here!
by Wesley Fink on July 20, 2007 11:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Memory
Gaming
Three DX9 games representing different gaming engines were used to test the performance of the Super Talent DDR3-1600C7 and the TEAM Xtreem DDR3-1600 in real world gaming. There are more recent gaming titles available, but they are also DX9. We will update games in the memory test suite as soon as a selection of DX10 games with reliable benchmarks is available. At that time the memory test OS will also be moved to Vista.
The Far Cry - River demo was run for 3 loops and results in FPS were averaged over the 3 runs.
Super Talent and TEAM dominate overall gaming performance of Far Cry and top the charts from 1333 to 2000+ memory speeds. Far Cry performs slightly better at 1066 with fast DDR2 memory on the P35 chipset, much as we expected.
Quake 4 and the underlying engine have always proved to be very sensitive to improvements in memory bandwidth. This is amply demonstrated in these memory tests. Again in all cases DDR2 and DDR3 are faster on P35 than the fastest DDR2 on P965. The pattern is the same as in Far Cry but the differences are magnified in Q4. The lower latencies of the new Micron Z9 DIMMs move that DDR3 to the top at 1333, and at every speed above it. It would be very interesting here if the CPU speed could be held constant and only the memory speed varied, but available ratios and the 333 multiplier make that all but impossible. What we need are 1600, 1666, and 2000 ratios available on upcoming motherboards - in addition to the 1333, 1066, 1000, and 800 that are already available.
We include Half-Life 2: Lost Coast as a representative of games that are less sensitive to improvements in memory bandwidth. Lost Coast is played through the Steam engine, where there is the constant worry, for a reviewer, that each new update of Steam will break your test benchmarks. Though the differences are very subtle and HL2 performance is most influenced by the video card used in the benchmark, there are nonetheless patterns that are exactly the same as the other two games. All P35 results are faster than the same fast DDR2 results on P965. DDR2 on the P35 is slightly faster at 1066 and the new Z9 DDR3 is tops in results at DDR3-1333 and higher.
The Super Talent and TEAM results are very close at all speeds, but Super Talent manages to be ever so slightly faster at every speed in every benchmark. Since the base memory chips are the same, a slight alteration in binning or small changes to programming the SPD could bring the Super Talent and TEAM into parity or move TEAM to the lead.
Three DX9 games representing different gaming engines were used to test the performance of the Super Talent DDR3-1600C7 and the TEAM Xtreem DDR3-1600 in real world gaming. There are more recent gaming titles available, but they are also DX9. We will update games in the memory test suite as soon as a selection of DX10 games with reliable benchmarks is available. At that time the memory test OS will also be moved to Vista.
The Far Cry - River demo was run for 3 loops and results in FPS were averaged over the 3 runs.
 |
| Click to enlarge |
Super Talent and TEAM dominate overall gaming performance of Far Cry and top the charts from 1333 to 2000+ memory speeds. Far Cry performs slightly better at 1066 with fast DDR2 memory on the P35 chipset, much as we expected.
 |
| Click to enlarge |
Quake 4 and the underlying engine have always proved to be very sensitive to improvements in memory bandwidth. This is amply demonstrated in these memory tests. Again in all cases DDR2 and DDR3 are faster on P35 than the fastest DDR2 on P965. The pattern is the same as in Far Cry but the differences are magnified in Q4. The lower latencies of the new Micron Z9 DIMMs move that DDR3 to the top at 1333, and at every speed above it. It would be very interesting here if the CPU speed could be held constant and only the memory speed varied, but available ratios and the 333 multiplier make that all but impossible. What we need are 1600, 1666, and 2000 ratios available on upcoming motherboards - in addition to the 1333, 1066, 1000, and 800 that are already available.
 |
| Click to enlarge |
We include Half-Life 2: Lost Coast as a representative of games that are less sensitive to improvements in memory bandwidth. Lost Coast is played through the Steam engine, where there is the constant worry, for a reviewer, that each new update of Steam will break your test benchmarks. Though the differences are very subtle and HL2 performance is most influenced by the video card used in the benchmark, there are nonetheless patterns that are exactly the same as the other two games. All P35 results are faster than the same fast DDR2 results on P965. DDR2 on the P35 is slightly faster at 1066 and the new Z9 DDR3 is tops in results at DDR3-1333 and higher.
The Super Talent and TEAM results are very close at all speeds, but Super Talent manages to be ever so slightly faster at every speed in every benchmark. Since the base memory chips are the same, a slight alteration in binning or small changes to programming the SPD could bring the Super Talent and TEAM into parity or move TEAM to the lead.
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retrospooty - Friday, July 20, 2007 - link
thanks.I would really like to see the effects of latency on the new DDR3 platform. Now that more options are availbale, it would be great to see scores using the lowest and highest latency settings achievable at 1066, 1333, 1600 etc...