Intel NUC NUC5i5RYK Running HyperX Impact 1600MHz and 1866MHz Memory Review
1866MHz Memory In The Intel NUC NUC5i5RYK
After swapping out the 1600MHz modules with the 1866MHz modules we were up and running in seconds. The Intel NUC NUC5i5RYK UEFI/BIOS allows you to manually adjust the memory, so we figured we’d give it a shot. We tried lowering the CAS Latency down to 9 from 10 and the system failed to post. After having to recover the UEFI/BIOS by removing the jumper on the board we tried overclocking the kit by increasing the memory multiplier and again found the NUC failed to post. After another successful UEFI/BIOS recovery we found ourselves happy with the default SPD settings of 1866MHz with 10-10-10-32 1T timings.
We ran a handful of benchmarks on the Intel NUC NUC5i5RYK and rather than making a chart for each specific test scenario we simply placed them into the table below. We ran Cinebench R15, 7-zip, 3DMark Sky Diver, PCMark 8, Sandra 2015 Memory Bandwidth and AIDA 64. It should come as a shock to anyone, but we saw performance improvements in all of the benchmark tests with the faster memory!
| Intel NUC5i5RYK | 1600MHz | 1866MHz | % Difference |
| Cinebench OpenGL | 31.80 fps | 36.63 fps | +15.2% |
| Cinebench CPU Multi | 259 cb | 263 cb | +1.5% |
| Cinebench CPU Single | 107 cb | 110 cb | +2.8% |
| 7-Zip | 7350 MIPS | 7389 MIPS | +0.5% |
| 3DMark Sky Diver | 3634 pts | 3955 pts | +8.8% |
| PCMark 8 | 3173 pts | 3273 pts | +3.2% |
| Sandra Memory Bandwidth | 16.10 GB/s | 20.68 GB/s | +28.4% |
| AIDA64 Memory Read | 20407 MB/s | 23445 MB/s | +14.9% |
| AIDA64 Memory Write | 22943 MB/s | 28597 MB/s | +24.6% |
| AIDA64 Memory Copy | 20118 MB/s | 25070 MB/s | +24.6% |
| AIDA64 Memory Latency | 70.8 ns | 68.9 ns | +2.7% |
The greatest improvement was 28.4% and that came in the Sandra Memory Bandwidth benchmark test where we found the memory bandwidth of our system went from 16.10 GB/s to 20.68 GB/s! The smallest performance gain came in 7-zip where there was just the workload improved by just half a percent. One of the areas that saw the most improvement was in the graphics tests, so we figured we’d look closer at a couple real game titles.
Let’s take a look at them on the next page