Test System Setup

Processor(s): Intel i7 920 @ 3.8GHz (190MHz x 20)

Cooling: Noctua NH-U12P (Supplied by Noctua)

Motherboard(s): GIGABYTE EX58-UD5 (Supplied by GIGABYTE)

Graphics Card(s): GIGABYTE GTX 285 (Supplied by GIGABYTE)

Hard Disk(s): Western Digital 300GB Velicorapter (Supplied by Western Digital)

Operating System: Windows Vista SP1 64-Bit

Drivers: ForceWare 181.20

The particular memory we have with us today is from Crucial and these are quite basic kits. With no heat spreader and a speed rating of just 1333MHz, we thought we would have to adjust our test system.

Placing the kits in our test system gave us a nice surprise once we began efforts to clock them up a bit. We managed to push them to 1520MHz with timings of 9-9-9-24. While these timings are quite loose, the kits ran beautifully and allowed us to leave the testbed as is and just get stuck straight into our benchmarking.

For those wondering the model numbers of these kits, the 6GB one is CT3KIT25664BA1339 and the 3GB one is CT3KIT12864BA1339, these going for $170.00 and $93.99 USD respectively over at Newegg. While they aren't anything fancy and we haven't done full separate reviews on them yet, the testing we've done today shows that they're impressive modules and offer excellent value for money, especially if you're just looking for memory that doesn't have all the bling of the more expensive modules.

Just quickly, before we get into the benchmarks I will make note that our lineup is a combination of synthetic memory and graphics benchmarks along with some real world gaming tests thrown in. In the conclusion we will wrap everything up and also talk about how Windows Vista felt with the two different kits installed.

wPrime

Version and / or Patch Used: 1.62

Developer Homepage: http://www.wprime.net/

Product Homepage: http://www.wprime.net/

wPrime uses a recursive call of Newton's method for estimating functions, with f(x)=x2-k, where k is the number we're sqrting, until Sgn(f(x)/f'(x)) does not equal that of the previous iteration, starting with an estimation of k/2. It then uses an iterative calling of the estimation method a set amount of times to increase the accuracy of the results. It then confirms that n(k)2=k to ensure the calculation was correct. It repeats this for all numbers from 1 to the requested maximum.

wPrime shows that both memory configurations perform very similar, but this isn't really a surprise as wPrime prefers speed over quantity and with both kits running at the same speed there should be no significant difference.