Introduction

Memory performance on the new platform has been all over the place and I've personally been talking to both motherboard and RAM manufacturers to see what we can do about the performance. The big issue at the moment is under AIDA64 - an almost industry standard benchmark for us, we see that Quad Channel isn't painted in the best light.

It's not our job to go out there and make sure the product is painted in the best light. It's not like Intel has turned around and said anything to us, though, it's just this personal issue I'm having at the moment with the numbers we're getting out of Quad Channel memory in our normal benchmarks. It doesn't make sense that from a bandwidth perspective it offers no more performance than Dual Channel, if not slightly less at times.

Some of the numbers we've seen under AIDA64 haven't lined up with what you'd think Quad Channel is capable of. The general word around was that if you look at the performance under SiSoft Sandra and Passmark PerformanceTest, you're able to get a better idea with what's going on with bandwidth for the new standard.

So today with our Corsair Dominator GTX8 kit we've taken the time to run through not only under AIDA64 again, but also PerformanceTest and Sandra. We've also run our RAM in a number of different settings, but we'll cover that in the next page when we look at the Test System Setup.

A lot of us know, though, that the speed of memory at times makes very little difference to the overall performance of our system. For most of us the CPU speed along with the video card performance are going to show us the biggest differences. With so much Quad Channel RAM arriving, though, we need to make sure we're able to show the difference between the kits we have when it comes to the performance of them.

There's not much else that really needs to be said. We'll quickly talk about the RAM we're using on the next page, but we won't go into massive amounts of detail on that as we'll offer a full review on the kit soon enough. Once we've looked at the testbed, though, we'll get straight into our three benchmark programs to see just what's going on with performance before we finally wrap everything up.

Well, I think that pretty much covers what needs to be said at the moment. Let's move onto our Test System Setup before we get into the performance side of things.