AIDA64 Benchmark
AIDA64 Extreme Edition is a diagnostic and benchmarking software suite for home users that provides a wide range of features to assist in overclocking, hardware error diagnosis, stress testing, and sensor monitoring. It has unique capabilities to assess the performance of the processor, system memory, and disk drives.
The benchmarks used in this review are the memory bandwidth and latency benchmarks. Memory bandwidth benchmarks (Memory Read, Memory Write, Memory Copy) measure the maximum achievable memory data transfer bandwidth. The code behind these benchmark methods are written in Assembly and they are extremely optimized for every popular AMD, Intel and VIA processor core variants by utilizing the appropriate x86/x64, x87, MMX, MMX+, 3DNow!, SSE, SSE2, SSE4.1, AVX, and AVX2 instruction set extension.
The Memory Latency benchmark measures the typical delay when the CPU reads data from system memory. Memory latency time means the penalty measured from the issuing of the read command until the data arrives to the integer registers of the CPU.
SuperPI Benchmark
SuperPi calculates the number of digits of PI in a pure 2D benchmark. For the purposes of this review, calculation to 32 million places will be used. RAM speed, RAM timings, CPU speed, L2 cache, and Operating System tweaks all effect the speed of the calculation, and this has been one of the most popular benchmarks among enthusiasts for several years.
SuperPi was originally written by Yasumasa Kanada in 1995 and was updated later by snq to support millisecond timing, cheat protection and checksum. The version used in these benchmarks, 1.5 is the official version supported by hwbot.
As you can see there is absolutely zero performance differences between 16GB and 32GB. This will become critical in the next section, but for the time being just keep it in the back of your mind.
Next up is that RAM speed does impact overall system performance. The difference is not all that much…but it does add up. Equally important is this DDR4-2666 price kit can easily be turned into a DDR4-3000 kit, and that makes the Crucial Ballistix Elite 32GB kit one heck of a value!
Real World Test Results Page
ADOBE CS6 LOAD TIME
Photoshop is a notoriously slow loading program under the best of circumstances, and while the latest version is actually pretty decent, when you add in a bunch of extra brushes and the such you get a really great torture test which can bring even the best of the best to their knees. Let’s see how our review unit faired in the Adobe crucible!
VMWare Load Time Performance
VMWare is a powerful application which allows users the ability to run a virtualized Operating System from inside their main OS. This program is not only processor and RAM intensive but puts significant load on the storage subsystem with deep, heavy read/write IO requests to the drive. To help give you a general idea on the performance improvements from running a RAM Drive we have timed the time it takes to load XP SP3 from inside VMWare.
As you can see it really will be variable on how useful the additional 16GB of RAM really is. Basically for smaller applications like Adobe even a 4GB RAM Drive is more than enough; whereas for larger programs like running a virtualized OS in VMWare…32GB of RAM is the absolute minimum.
In either case the faster the RAM the faster the program will become – however the differences are rather slim and we doubt anyone would notice. With that being said considering the additional speed is free and just requires a bit of work this additional performance is still a nice little bonus.
