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Test setup
All of today's testing has been run on the following:
- Intel Core i5 750
- 4GB (2x 2GB) G-Skill 1333MHz DDR3 memory
- 4GB (2x 2GB) OCZ PC3-15000 Platinum Low Voltage 1866MHz DDR3 memory
- ASUS Maximus III Formula (Socket LGA 1156, PCI Express 2.0)
- 750GB Seagate hard drive
- Pioneer 16x DVD-ROM
- AMD Radeon HD 5870 1GB
- 1000W Thermaltake Toughpower power supply
- Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit Edition)
The following drivers were used:
The latest available driver was used for all hardware components
Benchmarks used
- WinRAR 3.71
- Cinebench R10
- SuperPi mod1.5
- x264 benchmark 2.0
- Everest Ultimate Edition
- SiSoft Sandra 2010
- Crysis: Warhead
Elite Bastards custom timedemo, application AA
Synthetic benchmarks
For the duration of this review we'll be looking at OCZ's 4GB DDR3 PC3-15000 Platinum Low Voltage Dual Channel memory kit in two configurations - First, with our Intel Core i5 750 system (complete with enthusiast-centric Maximus III Formula motherboard) set to its stock speeds, running our memory at 1,333MHz and using its relatively tight SPD-configured timings for this speed as noted below.
Of course, there's little point in buying memory modules such as these simply to run your system at stock speeds and settings, and so we also spent some time making the most of OCZ's offering here in an overclocked configuration. We did this by setting our motherboard's CPU multiplier to 21x, increasing our base clock speed to 190MHz and upping the CPU voltage to 1.3 Volts to give us an entirely stable 4GHz overclock for our Core i5 750 CPU.
With this in place, we were also able to make full use of our shiny new memory modules, setting them to a speed of 1,900MHz within the BIOS while still enjoying the advertised memory timings available at this kind of speed level, as you can see below.
Using both these stock and overclocked configurations, we've run our system through a number of both synthetic and real-world benchmarks to see the kind of performance levels on offer when kitting out our particular system with OCZ's 4GB DDR3 PC3-15000 Platinum Low Voltage Dual Channel memory.
Everest
Our first port of call is a brief look at synthetic memory bandwidth via Everest's in-built application to test just this aspect of our system.
At stock speeds, memory bandwidth is as you'd expect, but our overclocking to 1,900MHz on the memory side of things nets us around a 25% bandwidth advantage.
Memory overclocking nets us similar reductions in latency, with around a 28% reduction on show here as we boost our DDR3 memory speed to 1,900MHz.
SiSoft Sanda
Along similar lines, let's see what another synthetic benchmark in the form of SiSoft Sandra has to say about our system's memory bandwidth.
Our overclocking gains thanks to OCZ's memory are huge here, providing us with a 65% boost in both integer and floating-point memory performance.
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