Application Performance Results

While we normally choose Far Cry 2 or Crysis benchmark but this time I opted for Grand Theft Auto IV. This game can take a pretty good load from your GPU if you configure all the settings to the max. While Crysis didn't normally show a difference bigger than 1FPS with different timings and frequencies, we expected GTA IV could substantiate this. Let's check it out:

Again, overclocking your RAM won´t give any noticeable differences on final performance (not even 1 FPS). In this case, going from 1333MHz to 1600MHz barely gave 1 extra FPS. Of course, if you really want to improve your gaming experience, you´ll need to change your GPU, and leave your CPU and RAM alone as long as they are up to the task and not a bottleneck for the rest of your PC.

Adobe Photoshop CS5 is our new contender for the memory suite. This program can benefit from both CPU and memory, and additionally, it supports Nvidia CUDA and ATI Stream. Retouch Artists Test does a list of basic processes into an image similar to what someone would do to edit their vacation photos. There are some image resizing, duplicated layers, colors levels and image adjustments involved on the test. While this isn't a strict Benchmark (because you need to take the time with an external clock), the results difference in this Photoshop's version is pretty noticeable. Notice the more MHz, the faster performance.

From the worst to the best result there are 32 seconds doing the difference, which means overclocking your RAM might help doing tasks on this kind of software. Now imagine those numbers reflect hours instead of seconds and you will definitively see a change. The problem for an average user would be that those differences are too small to be noticed because we normally don't use a list of actions for every photo. Instead, each photo gets personalized with different patterns and configurations done in different times.

WinRAR is a very simple, yet useful application. How many times do you compress or decompress random files in a day? Well, WinRAR has its own integrated benchmark which measures an average of KB/s compression. This application supports multi-threading, 64 bits OS, and it´s very CPU dependant. There is a 5% performance improvement using 1600MHz compared to the worst result. Not really a mayor change, but it´s still there.

Summarizing the application performance results, we can see that overclocking RAM isn´t a big deal nowadays. CPUs with bigger caches definitively ignore RAM frequency and timings and that trend doesn't seem to end yet. In fact, for application tests the best configuration is 1600MHz 8-8-8 with 1.55v.

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