G.SKILL Ripjaws 1866MHz 8GB DDR3L SO-DIMM Memory Kit Review

NUC Memory Overclocking Results:

SiSoftware Sandra 2014 w/ DDR3L 1600MHz:

SiSoftware Sandra 2014 w/ DDR3L 1866MHz:

SiSoftware Sandra 2014 showed that the NUC went from having 13.85 GB/s of memory bandwidth at 1600MHz up to 15.53 GB/s with the 1866MHz overclock. This is a 12.5% performance improvement when it comes to the memory bandwidth of the system.

AIDA64 v4.00 Beta w/ DDR3L 1600MHz:

AIDA64 v4.00 Beta w/ DDR3L 1866MHz:

AIDA64 v4.00.2731 Beta showed the memory read went from 14545 MB/s to 16586 MB/s, which is a 14% increase in memory performance by going from 1600MHz to 1866MHz. Also notice the latency went from 93.5 ns to 88.3 ns, which is a 5.5% decrease.

Futuremark 3DMark w/ DDR3L 1600MHz:

Futuremark 3DMark w/ DDR3L 1866MHz:

In the latest build of 3DMark we found solid performance with a score of 32,546 in Ice Storm, 3,418 in Cloud Gate and 702 in Fire Strike with 1600MHz memory. With 1866MHz memory the scores improved across the board to 35,326 in Ice Storm, 3,587 in Cloud Gate and 807 in Fire Strike. This is a 5% performance gain in Cloud Gate, which is the ideal 3D benchmark for a desktop system like the NUC with Intel HD 5000 Graphics.

Cinebench R15 w/ DDR3L 1600MHz:

Cinebench R15 w/ DDR3L 1866MHz:

Moving along to Cinebench R15 we found the Intel NUC with the Intel Core i5-4520U processor scored just a tad higher on the CPU test, but the Intel HD Graphics 5000 jumped up from 24.02 FPS to 27.59 FPS on the OpenGL benchmark. We’ll take a 14.8% performance gain by switching out a memory kit any day!

TrueCrypt w/ DDR3L 1600MHz:

TrueCrypt w/ DDR3L 1866MHz:

The last performance test that we wanted to run was TrueCrypt and we found the mean score of the AES algorithm benchmark test went from 764 MB/s to 787 MB/s. This isn’t a huge increase, but it’s still a 3% performance gain on a test that isn’t really memory bandwidth limited to begin with.