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Intel Sandy Bridge-E, analysis of the performance of the Core i7 3960X (Part 2) - Memory scaling

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sandy_bridge-e

In this second part we will analyze in detail the performance of the Intel i7-3960X with Sandy Bridge-E architecture.  Several tests will be run with various software, specific tests on the memory, CPU frequency, 3D and consumption scaling and overclocking. Very interesting are the comparison tests the Intel i7-980X.

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Memory scaling

On this page we decided to investigate a topic that often leaves a lot of confusion in the reader, that is how the performance change with varying type of memory installed. In this case, type refers to modules that differ in the operating frequency. For all platforms, we decided to test computational memory set at the following frequencies and relative timings:
•    1333 MHz CL. 7-7-7-20 1T
•    1600 MHz CL. 8-8-8-22 1T
•    1866 MHz CL. 9-9-9-24 1T
The reference software we primarily used was AIDA64, where we analyzed the bandwidth of read, write, copy and access times to memory. The second software is WinRar 4.01 (stable version), which typically can achieve good performance increase with faster memory. The last software we used is Cinebench R11.5, where we checked the score on the multi-core.
You can see below the graphs for AIDA 64, where the bandwidth and access time were analyzed:

aida64_READ

aida64_write

aida64_copy

aida64_latency

We have not noted big increases moving from a type of memory with a frequency of 1333 MHz to a type of memory set to 1866 MHz. 3960X memory controller seems to benefit less of the increased frequency of memory compared to 2600K, leaving some disappointment also in terms of scaling.
The second reference software is the known compression/decompression program WinRAR, where in effect for all architectures have shown increased performance rising the frequency of system memory. You can see below the graph we have achieved:

winrar

From the graph can be derived for all platforms that best results are achieved by using more driven memories, this is because WinRAR is a software which improves performance when you go to use the high frequency memories, which thus provide a greater bandwidth. Intel CPUs are the most affected by the transition from a less powerful memory to more powerful one.
The latest software is Cinebench in the 11.5 version by Maxon that uses the Cinema 4D rendering engine. The benchmark, freely downloadable from the producer, enables us to make a comparison, in this case on multicore, on the various CPUs tried. We can observe the results that gave us such software:

cinebench

With Cinebench is clearly seen that the memories do not have any effect on the final result, because the platforms have no substantive differences between using 1333 MHz memory and use memory frequency of 1866 MHz.

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