The reasons to purchase a high performance RAM kit are as varied as the consumers who purchase them. For some application load time is the deciding factor in their purchasing decision. For others it is Virtualized Operating System performance. For others still it is game load times. For others still it is to shave a .1 of second off their synthetic test scores so as to climb ever higher in the online rankings that various sites host.
With such a wide variety of criteria it behooves us to use as wide and varied a list of testing protocols as possible. As such we have used a blend of synthetic and real world benchmarks, as well as custom real world game benchmarking.
For real world and video games we have used the same tests as we use for storage testing and created a RAMDrive. Specifically, we have used Borderlands, GTA V, and Saints Row 3.
For synthetic tests we used Cinebench, FAHBench, SuperPi, and AIDA tests.
For real world tests we used Adobe PhotoShop and VMWare.
The OS was a fresh clean install of Windows 7 with all latest hotfixes, patches and updates applied.
To show the performance differences we have tested at stock, ‘XMP’, and then manual overclocking levels. All tests were run 4 times and average results are represented.
For overclocking we do not overclock the CPU and rather only the RAM is overclocked to show performance gains that the RAM will net consumers. To ensure that any overclock we do obtain is realist we also limit voltage to – at most – 1.40volts. Anything above this bordering on dangerous to the RAM and will noticeably reduce the longetivity of the DDR4 RAM ICs.
Main Test System
Processor: Intel i7 5930K or Intel i7 6700K
Memory: Test Kit
Video Card: MSI 980Ti Lightning
Motherboard: Asus Sabertooth X99 or Asus Z170 Deluxe
Cooling: Noctua U12S
SSD: 1x Intel 750 1.2TB NVMe SSD
Power Supply: Corsair AX860i
Monitor: Dell U2714H
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate x64 SP1
