DDR4-4000 Skylake Benchmark Comparisons

yashiro · 25 May 2016 at 15:30

http://www.techspot.com/article/1171-ddr4-4000-mhz-performance/

Worth a read if you're building a Skylake system in the near future.

stulid · 25 May 2016 at 16:16

Good stuff, thanks for that.

Kurgen · 25 May 2016 at 20:39

I have scanned this article very quickly.. does this mean that if you are using a single GPU system there is little or no gaming benefit it getting ram faster than 2133/2400?

yashiro · 25 May 2016 at 20:48

That's not what it says at all.

Kurgen · 25 May 2016 at 21:19

so what does this mean ?

"As you can see a single GTX 980 Ti is fully tapped even with DDR4-2133 memory"

yashiro · 25 May 2016 at 21:36

As you can see a single GTX 980 Ti is fully tapped even with DDR4-2133 memory. The ultra-quality settings paired with HairWorks are too much for this GPU configuration to take advantage of the CPU processor power provided by all that additional bandwidth.

It means that in that one benchmark of Witcher 3 with the single 980Ti the increased ram speed had no effect because the bench was limited by other factors.

Kurgen · 25 May 2016 at 21:55

right o, cheers for clearing up

abui1806 · 26 May 2016 at 01:43

it seems like there is a bottleneck when using a dual gpu setup on socket 1151 system at low ram speed. Also the capacity of ram tested was 8GB, I imagine it could be better and less frequency dependent at 16GB?
Now interested to see a test between 5820K @ 4.5Ghz using 2666-3000Mhz RAM vs 6700K @ 4.5Ghz using 4000Mhz RAM in a SLI setup.

8 Pack · 26 May 2016 at 06:12

Skylake really likes RAM speed with many applications. I have seen this also in testing for systems.

Hence why I choose 3866mhz mem speed at 8 GB and 3733 at 16gb.

Haswell E is benefiting but not as much.

Cache frequency on Skylake is also helping with this regard. At around 4.4 it's a good boost.

Bigminimus · 2 Jun 2016 at 16:46

Thanks for that, really helped me choose my ram.

Tute · 7 Jun 2016 at 23:32

So is this only worth it when running highly overclocked systems with multiple GPUs?

Just that I saw the Techspot article and then a google returned this:

http://techbuyersguru.com/gaming-ddr4-memory-2133-vs-26663200mhz-8gb-vs-16gb?page=1

Which seems to suggest that with a single 980Ti there's little to no point in getting faster RAM?

yashiro · 8 Jun 2016 at 08:25

The take away is that when you're less GPU limited higher frequency DDR4 increases frame rate and is good way to boost minimum fps. This is what the Techspot article shows, and also to a lesser degree on the website you linked. (You want the next page though. You linked the X99 graphs)

Their conclusion:

Averaged across our seven games, we see a 2% boost in average FPS and a 3% boost in minimums going from DDR4-2133 to DDR4-3200, which is relatively impressive given the settings we were playing at (maxed out at 2560x1440, typically). Investing in something other than DDR4-2133, even the fast DDR4-2133 we used, seems to be worthwhile, especially given the market-defying fact that DDR4-2666 is often cheaper!

The gains from the article you linked are smaller for sure (they capped at 3200) but they are there. Additionally, Digital Foundry put out some videos a while back saying the same thing if you want to check those out. It's probably not worth it as an upgrade, but if you're building from scratch this is information you should research and decide if the additional cost is worth it.