General Performance: Memory

Using a combination of frequencies and timings we see that the Core i7 is capable of some pretty impressive bandwidths. With the DDR3 memory operating at 1.6GHz the bandwidth reached 27GB/s, which is amazing when compared to Core 2 and Phenom processors.

Lowering the memory frequency to 1.33GHz reduced the bandwidth by roughly 15% to 23GB/s, while at 1.06GHz the bandwidth dropped to 20GB/s, another 13% reduction. Finally, when reducing the memory frequency to just 800MHz, the bandwidth dropped off by another 30% reaching just 14.5GB/s.

The EVEREST results are a little more interesting as they show very similar write performance for the DDR3-800/1066 and 1333 configurations. The read performance did increase in a more progressive manner.

The memory frequency appeared to have had little impact on the SuperPI calculation time, which is not something we were expecting. Perhaps the higher timings of the faster memory offset the frequency boost, though this wasn't the case when comparing the DDR3-800 and 1066 results.

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