DDR3 Round-Up: Core i7 Performance Analysis

Crysis - CPU Benchmark 1024 x 768 Resolution

Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 9 x64 Timed Video Encoding Benchmark

While we saw heavy variance in our synthetic tests, our first round of real-world test shows small performance differences between our kits. Our memory intensive Crysis test shows less than 1 FPS difference between all of the kits, despite all the clock speed and timing differences. Of course, in comparison to Intel's default Core i7 spec of DDR3-1066, all of these high-end kits do perform substantially better.

We see absolutely zero difference in our Windows Media Encoding test, as all of our sets deliver the same result. Not surprising, given this is a CPU intensive benchmark. This does highlight an important point, in that if you are bottlenecked by another system component, faster memory just won't help.