Corsair Dominator TWIN2X2048-8888C4DF

We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. SANDRA consists of a set of information and diagnostic utilities that can provide a host of useful information about your hardware and operating system.  We ran SANDRA's Memory Bandwidth test on a Core 2 Extreme X6800 powered test bed with three different brands / types of memory installed.  The BIOS was set to AUTO for these tests, so the different RAM modules were being run at standard JEDEC DDR2-800 specifications here.

Performance Comparison with SiSoft SANDRA 2007 Raw Bandwidth

Without tweaking the BIOS in any way, each of the memory kits performed similarly in SANDRA's memory bandwidth benchmark.  Only a few megabytes per second separated the various kits in either test.

Performance Comparison with PCMark05 Overall Memory Score

For our next round of benchmarks, we ran the Memory performance module built-into Futuremark's PCMark05. For those interested in more than just the graphs, we've got a quote from Futuremark that explains exactly what this test does and how it works...

"The Memory test suite is a collection of tests that isolate the performance of the memory subsystem. The memory subsystem consists of various devices on the PC. This includes the main memory, the CPU internal cache (known as the L1 cache) and the external cache (known as the L2 cache). As it is difficult to find applications that only stress the memory, we explicitly developed a set of tests geared for this purpose. The tests are written in C++ and assembly. They include: Reading data blocks from memory, Writing data blocks to memory performing copy operations on data blocks, random access to data items and latency testing."

Once again, all of the memory kits we tested performed similarly in PCMark05's memory test module. As we've mentioned, without specifying timings and frequencies, the motherboard ran each memory kit at the same settings, which resulted in a dead-heat in this test.

In-Game Performance Comparisons System Memory Affects Framerates?  You Betcha!

We continued our testing with some low-resolution F.E.A.R. tests. Despite the fact that this is a game benchmark that can be used to test the relative performance of video cards, frame rates are strongly influenced by processor speed and available memory bandwidth, especially at low resolutions, which is how we ran the tests to get the frame rates listed below.

There was only a three frame per second spread in our low-res F.E.A.R. benchmarks, which falls well within the margin of error in this test. Things are likely to change once we dial in each kit for their rated speeds, however.