Next in our line of memory reviews is a kit I have actually had at my work desk for a while.  In the land of overclockers, synthetics are everything – if it can get a higher number on a screen, and that number can be pushed, then it is worth it. Thus in comes G.Skill with their high end TridentX range, pushing the boat from DDR3-2400 C10 (both 4GB and 8GB modules) all the way up to DDR3-2800 C11 (4GB modules only).  The kit we are testing today falls right in the middle of all of this, being a 2x4 GB kit of DDR3-2666 11-13-13.  This is an 8 GB kit that retails at $170, and for that money we could easily pick up a 2x8 GB 2400 C10 kit.  Proof will be in the pudding as we put this kit through the testing suite – let us see if it is actually relevant for day-to-day use.

As part of a series of memory reviews, the next kit to enter our test beds is a limited edition enthusiast kit from GeIL.  Attached with what GeIL is calling a ‘Frost White’ colored heatsink, this is a two module dual channel kit with a total of 16 GB running at DDR3-2400 MHz at 11-12-12-30 sub-timings, and retails for ~$150.  Read on for the full review.

Memory reviews are, in my opinion, actually quite hard to do.  There are plenty of memory kits available that are nice and cheap, and the easy way to differentiate between them in a review is usually though synthetics – without too much effort we can find memory comparison articles online that deal solely in synthetics.  The downside of synthetics is that they rarely emulate real-world performance.  When the requests came in for a comparison of memory kits available on the market, I was stumped to find real-world examples where memory truly matters by significant margins, and benchmarks to match.  Fast forward a month or so, and we have compiled a series of tests taking advantage of some of the most memory limited examples common to most users – IGP performance using memory from DDR3-1333 to DDR3-2400.  Inside this review we have also mixed in some encoding, compression, and you may be surprised to hear that USB 3.0 performance is also affected by memory speed.  In this article we also look at and review the memory kits that G.Skill has gracefully provided from their Ares, Sniper, RipjawsX, RipjawsZ and TridentX brands.

Intel's Second Generation Core processors, based on the Sandy Bridge architecture, include a number of improvements over the previous generation's Nehalem architecture. We’ll be testing one specific area today: the improved memory controller. Current Sandy Bridge based processors officially support up to DDR3-1333 memory. Unfortunately, due to changes in the architecture, using faster rated memory (or overclocking memory) on Sandy Bridge via raising the base clock is extremely limited. Luckily, there are additional memory multipliers that support DDR3-1600, DDR3-1866, and DDR3-2133 memory. Some motherboards include support for even higher memory multipliers, but we’ll confine our investigations to DDR3-2133 and below.

Since Sandy Bridge is rated for up to DDR3-1333 memory, we will start there and work our way up to DDR3-2133 memory. We'll also be testing a variety of common CAS latency options for these memory speeds. Our purpose is to show how higher bandwidth memory affects performance on Sandy Bridge, and how latency changes—or doesn’t change—the picture. More specifically, we’ll be looking at the impact of memory speed on application and gaming performance, with some synthetic memory tests thrown into the mix. We’ll also test some overclocked configurations. So how much difference will lowering the CAS latency make, and does memory performance scale with processor clock speed? Read on to find out.