4000MHz RAM Test: Does Memory Speed Matter in Intel CPU Gaming? - article
Today's analysis focuses on the Intel test platform, on which we tested a 4000MHz certified RAM kit by scaling the frequencies down to 3200MHz passing through intermediate steps of 200MHz, maintaining the kit timings equal to CL19. We also went further by trying the overclocking up to 4200MHz, and in addition we reduced the timings to CL16 from 3200MHz to 4000MHz. Finally, we also tried three kits of RAM to their XMP profiles to see if there are major changes between the RAMs of the different manufacturers that travel at their respective factory frequencies. There are therefore 14 different configurations in total, and this inevitably took time to perform all the tests.
As usual, we will focus on the gaming with three of our four favorite titles tested, but we will dive in a little bit of loads of work on the creation of content to see if the higher frequencies or the timing more difficult and the RAM can make the difference also in other usage scenarios. We have also compiled a quick guide to the purchase of the RAM to give you the basic rules for the assembly of your next gaming PC or upgrade.
For our testing, Corsair has provided us with two 8Gb modules of its RAM Vengeance RGB Pro DDR4-4000MHz , timing and XMP 2.0 19-23-23-45 to 1.35 V (this kit in Italy, sell for around €180 ). Looking more closely, these modules have a version number Corsair equal to 4.31, and this indicates that use memory chips Samsung B-Die. This type of RAM was the preferred choice to pair with the first models of Ryzen on the basis of their best performance, and should behave well on Intel platforms.
let's Speak now of the testing methodology. The benchmarks are mainly based on the elimination of the most as many variables as possible to obtain consistent results and reliable. There will always be some small variation from test to test, especially when analyzing games with a high frame-rate, but, ideally, this phenomenon is minimized at best. This factor is important to test the GPU, but it becomes doubly crucial for the test of the CPU, where different environmental conditions or even small processes that are activated in the background can dramatically change the results. The test of the RAM arises at a different level, given that we expect to experience gains in performance are relatively small and increasing slowly the frequencies.
To be in conditions to obtain the more reliable results, we first disabled the normal algorithm of the boost of the 9900K in our test platform, locking all cores to the turbo frequency all-core 4.7 GHz with multi-core enhancement enabled to prevent the power consumption becomes a limiting factor for the frequency. We have set the offset to AVX to 0 and the speed of the CPU fan to 100% to prevent throttling.
To 9900K we have coupled components, relatively high-end, including a cooler Gamer Storm Castle 240mm AiO, motherboard Asus Maximus XI Extreme and a SSD, NVMe 1TB of XGP. The graphics card used is always for our tests, namely the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Will Founders Edition.
With these items, we are ready to dive in the first part of our results, i.e. the test in the creation of content. We will analyze also how it differs in each of the 14 configurations in terms of performance the brute, in such a way to find the physical limits to be set in later stages of testing in the field of gaming.
Test of the RAM 4000MHz: The higher frequencies offer advantages?
Introduction, hardware overview, system testing [In this page] Benchmark content creation-Cinebench, Handbrake, AIDA64 Benchmark games: Ashes, Far Cry 5, Crysis 3-Test of the RAM 4000MHz RAM: the verdict of the Digital Foundry's Next
