4GB vs 8GB Corsair Dominator DDR2-1066 Results
There are a several 2GB vs 4GB article floating around the interweb right now which led me to wonder about the next level of memory capacity. Luckily I had two 4GB kits available to throw onto my trusty test bench and quickly ran thru some benchmarks to see if having 8GB of system memory made a difference.
The test bench consisted of :
CPU: Intel E8400
Mobo: ASUS Striker II Formula 780i
RAM: Corsair Dominator 4GB DDR2-1066 / 4GB DDR2-1142 (@1066) w/ Fan
GPU: EVGA Ultra 8800
HDD: Seagate Baraccuda 1TB
PSU: PC Power & Cooling 750 Silencer
Cooling: Custom Watercooling
OS: Windows Vista Ultimate 64bit SP1
I ran some performance benchmarks as well as a few gaming ones. The E8400 was clocked at 3GHz while the memory was set to DDR2-1066 CAS5. Here are the results.
The results show that there is little to no performance gain when upgrading from 4GB to 8GB of memory in these tests. Note that I did not run any video or photo encoding benchmarks. But both the Sandra and Everest benchmarks show no gain in bandwidth and the difference is negligible. And the gaming tests did not reveal any improvements either.
For right now, I would say that 4GB is more than enough for today's applications and games. Even though you might have a temptation to grab another 4GB kit to max out your motherboard's memory capcity, its just not worth it at the moment and you should spend your money elsewhere.
The test bench consisted of :
CPU: Intel E8400
Mobo: ASUS Striker II Formula 780i
RAM: Corsair Dominator 4GB DDR2-1066 / 4GB DDR2-1142 (@1066) w/ Fan
GPU: EVGA Ultra 8800
HDD: Seagate Baraccuda 1TB
PSU: PC Power & Cooling 750 Silencer
Cooling: Custom Watercooling
OS: Windows Vista Ultimate 64bit SP1
I ran some performance benchmarks as well as a few gaming ones. The E8400 was clocked at 3GHz while the memory was set to DDR2-1066 CAS5. Here are the results.
The results show that there is little to no performance gain when upgrading from 4GB to 8GB of memory in these tests. Note that I did not run any video or photo encoding benchmarks. But both the Sandra and Everest benchmarks show no gain in bandwidth and the difference is negligible. And the gaming tests did not reveal any improvements either.
For right now, I would say that 4GB is more than enough for today's applications and games. Even though you might have a temptation to grab another 4GB kit to max out your motherboard's memory capcity, its just not worth it at the moment and you should spend your money elsewhere.
Total Comments 8
Comments
 |  more than a little disappointing, I was hoping that 8gb might really blow 4gb out the water as you have SO much fast access memory there. Thanks for the test, im sure loads of people will be very glad to see this infomation before throwing away money on another 4gb of RAM. |
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| |  Qazwsx, I expected that, and I'm "surprised" that the 8GB can keep up so close with the 4GB. If you look at 1GB (2x512MB) dual vs 2GB (2x1GB) dual in same quality and price "branch" normally the 1GB kit will blow the 2GB kit out of the water in terms of speed. It seems like the 780i doesn't suffer too much from handling that much memory, which can only be a good thing. 8GB is interesting only if you have a need for such a capacity (running large 3D applications, hi-res digital photo editing, movie encoding), but don't expect it to boost your framerate in games just yet. :) |
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| |  Would be nice to see another test to see if the chipset may have any hindering, see how it does on say an X38 or X48 chipset or even P35. |
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| | Yeah, it looks like I was wrong. Do you think apps will ever use asmuch as 4gb, let alone 8gb? With the speed of RAM, it seems we are highly limited by the speeds on the HDD and CPU. With the bottled power of a GPU hardly ever being touched in anything but games, i'd like to see more programmes take advantage of that raw power. Only then I think that computing can really move forwards. The 8800GTS has 624 gigaflops of theroretical shader processing rate (thanks wiki). Now too see that in other programmes, that would be speed. |
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| | This is supposed to be more of a test in capacity, not clock cycles and bandwidth. Adding more capacity does not add these areas as a gain. More capacity wants are dictated by usage, or basically how big of a chunk of data you have on your plate at one time. In this case, it's the 4G (an already high capacity) being benched on speed and throughput. Capacity is tested with large read/write sizes and not just counting the number of theoretical exchanges. As Polo points out, this capacity thing is still thought of as "Speed" somehow. These tests don't show the gains in how capacity can in fact help. All it really shows is that using the same memory doubled up is the same memory. |
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| |  I agree with B'nB. Wanna see if having more RAM really matters? Throw a 2GB PS file on it with the scratch off. Then run a few filters. I don't see having this much (8gigs) RAM improving gamer performance either. Game companies know that few machines will have more than ~3 GB. Most will have 1 or 2GB. How much crap does a game need to put in RAM amyways? Most of what goes on in the games folks seem to like is "just in time" stuff. RAM is not the bottle neck if the card has 512. The good news? Think of all the money a gamer can save? |
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| |  I have only once seen 4 gigs maxed out a machine, this was while slipstreaming Vista with SP1. If this was a daily routine I could justify a upgrade to 8 gigs, but what it comes down to is the applications that need the memory. |
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| |  @ RA1D Very nice article it's to the point, concise, informative and, comprehensible. Thanks for the hard work it was a nice read. I think the limitation resides within the system bus speed and hence the CPU itself. Keep in mind that Vista x64 will support up to 128GB of memory so we know new hardware improvements are on the horizon. For example Nehelem, Tylersburg and Bloomfield. Imagine a core2 or quad with a memory controller on die and Intel Chipsets with Nvidia's Sli support. I can't wait. Regards and Thanks Again |
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Recent Blog Entries by RA1D
- 4GB vs 8GB Corsair Dominator DDR2-1066 Results (May 26th, 2008)
- Enthusiast Explained (February 23rd, 2008)
- Choices (December 7th, 2007)
