Performance
Performance has been tested on the Intel Skylake-X platform which contains the 7900X, 10-core processor, EVGA X299 Dark motherboard, EVGA GTX1080Ti FE graphics card and Crucial P1 1TB SSD with installed Windows 10 x64 and the latest updates.
As usual, we will start with AIDA64 Cache and Memory benchmark, which is probably the best software for synthetic memory speed tests.
Our comparison includes overclocking results and settings at which the Ballistix Elite DDR4-3600 was stable. Maximum stable settings on our motherboard were DDR4-3800 CL18-18-18 at default 1.35V. The test platform is clearly limiting factor as the maximum clock is much higher on the Z390 chipset in dual channel mode. I will present some results on the next page where I will focus some more on the overclocking.
PCMark 10, which base on popular applications, is showing that performance is scaling better with memory frequency than latency. One more time, we can see that Ballistix’s XMP profile shows optimal performance, which is about as high or barely lower than that of overclocked memory. I said that during the Sport LT review and I will tell that again, excellent work with the memory profile.
Rendering benchmarks like Cinebench series, are showing that memory settings don’t matter much and all of our settings are fast. Of course, if we used much more relaxed timings, then the difference would be higher, but we wanted to present how users can set this memory without significant problems.
It’s time on some 3D benchmarks from UL(previously Futuremark).
3DMark and VRMark series benchmarks are showing higher performance gains related to memory settings at lower graphics details. It’s because less demanding environment uses more CPU power for calculations. In all tests, the XMP profile provides optimal performance, which is actually slightly better than that of overclocked settings. It’s related to the balance between memory latency and frequency, which at DDR4-3600 CL16 is simply the best.
More demanding 3D tests at the display resolution up to 8K are not much different. In Final Fantasy XV and Superposition benchmarks results are slightly better at higher memory frequency but nothing that would profoundly affect our gaming experience. There would be a higher difference between our results and that at lower memory clock like DDR4-2400. However, I doubt that anyone would decide on a standard memory for a gaming PC.
New games like Farcry 5 or Shadow of the Tomb Raider, which is using DirectX 12 show that the difference in performance between our memory settings is up to 2 FPS. The same games will show up to 5-6 FPS difference in 1080p display resolution. Simply if you play in lower screen resolution, then memory performance is more visible in games.
