Corsair TWINX2048-3500LL PRO

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 test on our AMD powered test bed with three different brands / types of memory installed.

Performance Comparison with SiSoft SANDRA 2005 Raw Bandwidth

At their default settings, all of the memory we tested performed at similar levels. The slight latency differences didn't seem to have much of an impact on SANDRA's buffered memory bandwidth benchmark, and neither did the increased capacity of the TWINX2048-3500LL Pro. Although the results were close, the 3500LL Pros did, technically, pull of the best scores.

Performance Comparison with PCMark04 Overall Memory Score

For our next round of benchmarks, we ran the Memory performance module built-into Futuremark's PCMark04. 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."

The TWINX2048-3500LL Pro kit pulled off the highest overall score in PCMark's memory benchmark, but not by much. The kit's 53 point margin of victory over the other Corsair modules we tested equates to a less than 1% difference, which falls well within the margin of error in this benchmark.

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

We continued our testing with some low-resolution Doom 3 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.

The increased capacity offered by the TWINX2048-3500LL Pro memory kit gave it a marked advantage over either of the other memory kits we tested. Bumping system memory up to 2GB helped increase the framerate in Doom 3 by about 8 - 12 frames per second over the competition.