Corsair Dominator TWIN2X2048-10000C5DF

We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. SANDRA consists of a set of information and diagnostic utilities that can provide a host of useful information about your hardware and operating system. We ran SANDRA's Memory Bandwidth and Latency tests on a Core 2 Extreme X6800 powered test bed with three different brands / types of memory installed.  The BIOS was set to AUTO for these tests, so the different RAM modules were being run at standard JEDEC DDR2-800 specifications here.

Performance Comparison with SiSoft SANDRA XI SP1 Raw Bandwidth

With all of the memory running in similar configurations, they all put up virtually identical scores in the two SANDRA tests we ran. There was no significant different between the kits when running at standard DDR2-800 speeds.

Performance Comparison with PCMark05 Overall Memory Score

For our next round of benchmarks, we ran the Memory performance module built-into Futuremark's PCMark05. For those interested in more than just the graphs, we've got a quote from Futuremark that explains exactly what this test does and how it works...

"The Memory test suite is a collection of tests that isolate the performance of the memory subsystem. The memory subsystem consists of various devices on the PC. This includes the main memory, the CPU internal cache (known as the L1 cache) and the external cache (known as the L2 cache). As it is difficult to find applications that only stress the memory, we explicitly developed a set of tests geared for this purpose. The tests are written in C++ and assembly. They include: Reading data blocks from memory, Writing data blocks to memory performing copy operations on data blocks, random access to data items and latency testing."

PCMark05's memory performance module didn't report any major differences either. This is expected behavior, however, considering all of the kits were configured by at standard DDR2-800 specifications.

In-Game Performance Comparisons System Memory Affects Framerates?  You Betcha!

We continued our testing with some low-resolution F.E.A.R. tests. Despite the fact that this is a game benchmark that can be used to test the relative performance of video cards, frame rates are strongly influenced by processor speed and available memory bandwidth, especially at low resolutions, which is how we ran the tests to get the frame rates listed below.

We had another dead heat with the low-res F.E.A.R. benchmark. On the pages, ahead, however, we'll test the three memory kits at their rated speeds and timings, which should yield much different results.