Crucial Ballistix Tactical LP and Sport VLP 1600MHz DDR3 Memory Kit Review
Memory Bandwidth and Latency Benchmarking
SiSoftware Sandra 2013a:
Sandra needs no introduction as it is the most popular memory performance benchmark available!
Crucial Ballistix Sport VLP 16GB (2x8GB) Memory Kit at 1600MHz CL9 w/ 1T:
Crucial Ballistix Tatical LP 16GB (2x8GB) Memory Kit at 1600MHz CL8 w/ 2T:
Crucial Ballistix Tatical LP 16GB (2x8GB) Memory Kit at 1600MHz CL8 w/ 1T:
Benchmark Results: The Sandra memory bandwidth benchmark shows that the less expensive Crucial Sport VLP memory kit had better memory bandwidth that the Crucial Tatical VLP memory kit by just a very small amount. The Crucial Ballistix might have tighter CL8 timings, but the 2T command rate really hurts performance. We lowered the command rate manually to 1T and the kit was stable and performance went from 21.44GB/s to 21.57GB/s by just changing the one setting!
AIDA64 Extreme Edition 2.80 Beta:
AIDA64 Extreme Edition 2.80 software is an excellent benchmarking tool for looking at memory performance on any desktop PC.
Crucial Ballistix Sport VLP 16GB (2x8GB) Memory Kit at 1600MHz CL9 w/ 1T:
Crucial Ballistix Tatical LP 16GB (2x8GB) Memory Kit at 1600MHz CL8 w/ 2T:
Crucial Ballistix Tatical LP 16GB (2x8GB) Memory Kit at 1600MHz CL8 w/ 1T:
Benchmark Results: Running AIDA64 Extreme Edition we found the read and write memory bandwidth scores to 18662MB/s and 19567MB/s on the Ballistix Sport VLP kit and 19001MB/s read and 19590 write on the Ballistix Tatical sport kit when both were running 1T command rates. The difference between the two memory kits with automatic XMP profile 1 settings was a wash.
Why the big difference between the AIDA64 and Sandra memory bandwidth scores? AIDA64 uses single-threaded memory bandwidth tests, so it will only use a single thread to move data to/from the memory modules. While Sandra uses multiple threads, so it’s a multi-threaded memory bandwidth benchmark.
MaxxMEM2 v1.99:
MaxxMEM is another memory benchmark that is starting to become more popular these days.
Crucial Ballistix Sport VLP 16GB (2x8GB) Memory Kit at 1600MHz CL9 w/ 1T:
Crucial Ballistix Tatical LP 16GB (2x8GB) Memory Kit at 1600MHz CL8 w/ 2T:
Crucial Ballistix Tatical LP 16GB (2x8GB) Memory Kit at 1600MHz CL8 w/ 1T:
Benchmark Results: The latest version of MaxxMEM showed minor differences between the memory kits, but it is measurable.
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