3GB, 6GB or 12GB Investigated

 

SuperPI is the benchmark of choice for many overclockers. It’s lightweight to download and can give a quick indication on how good a system is at number crunching. Once again, testing was performed a total of 5 times, with an average being calculated from the middle three results.

 

PassMark is a popular benchmarking suite which test all aspect of PC hardware.The CPU test examines Mathematical operations, compression, encryption, SSE, 3DNow! instructions and more. Each CPU test was performed a total of 5 times, with an average being calculated from the middle three results.


 

Adobe® Photoshop® CS4 software provides improved access to its unrivalled power through a more intuitive user experience, greater editing freedom, and significant productivity enhancements. For this benchmark we used a variety of filters on a single image and enabled the timing mode, adding the resulting times together to produce a single result. Memory performance settings were set to maximum for the timed runs.
 


 
 
Results Analysis

I was surprised at the SuperPI results given that all the kits were clocked exactly the same. All 3 kits began the same but the longer the test went on, the 6GB and 12GB kits started to pull away. The only logical explanation for this is that there was more room for windows processes to run in the allocation of memory. A lame explanation but the only one I can offer I’m afraid.

More distinct performance difference were to be had with Passmark’s Memory performance test, again showing the 12GB kit to be superior. Photoshop however, showed the biggest differences but as with the operating system, the 64bit version is required to fully utilise the 6 and 12GB capacities.

Let’s see if there is anything to separate the kits with our run of standard memory benchmarks…