Benchmarking at 245 MHz/DDR490

We lowered the clock multiplier of our Athlon 64 3500+ (2.2 GHz) from 11x to 9x and increased its memory bus from 200 MHz to 245 MHz, making the memories to run at DDR490 keeping the CPU running internally at 2.2 GHz. Let’s see how the reviewed kit performed under this configuration.

Sandra Lite 2005.SR3 10.69

We used the Memory Bandwidth Benchmark module from Sandra to measure the maximum transfer rate that the memory was able to achieve. The result published is an arithmetic average from the Buffered Integer Stream and Buffered Float Stream results.

You can check the results on the graph below.

Memories – 245MHz/DDR490 1T	Sandra - Int and Float Average	%
Patriot PDC2G3500LLK (2.5-3-2-5) – 2.7 V	6202	+1.16
Corsair TWINX2048-3500LLPRO (2.5-3-2-5) – 2.7 V	6190	+0.96
OCZ EL DDR PC-4000 Gold GX XTC (3-4-3-7) – 2.7 V	6131

On this test all memories achieved the same performance level.

3DMark2001 SE Build 3.3.0

3DMark2001 SE simulates older games based on DirectX 8.1 and it is very sensitive to changes in the hardware configuration of the system.

You can check the results on the graph below.

Memories – 245MHz/DDR490 1T	3DMark2001 SE (Build 3.3.0)	%
Patriot PDC2G3500LLK (2.5-3-2-5) – 2.7 V	23245	+2.28
Corsair TWINX2048-3500LLPRO (2.5-3-2-5) – 2.7 V	23180	+2.00
OCZ EL DDR PC-4000 Gold GX XTC (3-4-3-7) – 2.7 V	22726

On 3DMark2001 SE all tested memories have also achieved the same performance level.

Quake III Arena 1.32

Even though this is an old game its importance comes from the fact its engine is used by several other games, like Jedi Knight II and Medal of Honor, and also because this game is very sensitive to any changes on the hardware configuration.

We used the demo four available on version 1.32 of Quake III to make our benchmarking with this game. We ran this demo three times at 1024x768x32 resolution and all image quality settings on their default configuration and we picked the middle value for our comparisons, i.e. we discarded the highest and the lowest values.

Check the results below.

Memories – 245MHz/DDR490 1T	Quake III Arena - FPS	%
Patriot PDC2G3500LLK (2.5-3-2-5) – 2.7 V	474.8	+3.06
Corsair TWINX2048-3500LLPRO (2.5-3-2-5) – 2.7 V	474.4	+2.97
OCZ EL DDR PC-4000 Gold GX XTC (3-4-3-7) – 2.7 V	460.7

In order to reach 245 MHz the memory modules from OCZ had to use very high latencies, what lowered their performance on Quake III: Corsair TWINX2048-3500LLPRO was 2.97% faster and Patriot PDC2G3500LLK was 3.06% faster.

Super Pi Mod 1.4

Super Pi is a benchmarking software created at Tokyo University which measures the time spent to calculate Pi up to 32 million decimal places. In our tests we calculated Pi with 1 million decimal places.

Check the results below.

Memories – 245MHz/DDR490 1T	Super Pi Mod 1.4	%
Patriot PDC2G3500LLK (2.5-3-2-5) – 2.7 V	37.860	-1.94
Corsair TWINX2048-3500LLPRO (2.5-3-2-5) – 2,7 V	37.953	-1.70
OCZ EL DDR PC-4000 Gold GX XTC (3-4-3-7) – 2.7 V	38.609

On Super Pi the lower the result, the better, since it means seconds. Even though it has a higher latency OCZ EL DDR PC-4000 Gold GX XTC achieved a performance similar to the other memory modules we tested.

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