Picking The Right Memory Kit For Intel Core i7 Platforms

Sandra 2009 SP1 Memory Bandwidth

Sisoft; Sandra 2009 SP1:

The Sisoft Sandra 2009 benchmark utility just came out recently and we have started to include it in our benchmarking. With Sandra 2009 you can now easily compare the performance of the tested device with its speed and its (published) power (TDP)! Sandra XII SP2 also has SSE4 (Intel) and SSE4A (AMD) benchmark code-paths, which is great for those of you testing next-generation AMD & Intel chips.

Results: Sandra 2009 SP1 is a great benchmark that looks at synthetic memory performance. This benchmark showed that there is roughly a 10GB/Sec more throughput difference when going from a 1066MHz triple-channel CL7 kit to an 1866MHz triple-channel kit with CL8 timings. This represents a 51% performance gain, which is nothing to laugh at. The performance increase is also fairly linear, which is what I expected to see from the Core i7 platform. Notice the performance difference going from 1066MHz to 1333MHz is smaller than the performance difference when going from 1333MHz to 1600MHz. This could be directly related to the increased Uncore Clock Speed that we talked about in the introduction.