Performance
Performance has been tested on the Intel Rocket Lake-S platform, which contains the i7-11700K processor, MSI Z590I Unify motherboard, and ASRock RX 6800 XT Phantom Gaming graphics card. Used OS is Windows 10 x64 and the latest updates.
Our comparison includes overclocking results and settings where the Viper Elite II 16GB and 32GB DDR4-4000 memory kits were stable. Since the next review will cover the 32GB kit, I added results to the comparison so you can see how single-rank (16GB) and dual-rank (32GB) kits perform.
As usual, we will start with AIDA64 Cache and Memory benchmark, which is probably the best software for synthetic memory speed tests.
AIDA64 Memory and Cache benchmark likes high memory frequency. It’s clearly scaling well with memory frequency but also reacts well to memory latency. The most important result in daily work is memory copy. It’s also a similar result to what Windows 10 shows in its internal memory speed test.
The best results are, of course, on overclocked RAM, but even XMP settings are performing well on the Intel platform, regardless of quite relaxed timings. On AMD, we wish to keep it closer to DDR4-3600 because of the memory controller and infinity fabric ratios. However, on the latest Ryzen APU, we may set over DDR4-4000 with IMC/IF 1:1 ratio, promising great results.
If we look at latency results, we can see that the IMC ratio also counts on Intel. To match DDR4-3600 at Gear 1 mode, we had to overclock RAM up to DDR4-4800. On the other hand, all results are pretty good and stay between 52-60ns. We wouldn’t expect that looking at the XMP profiles.
In the Cinebench R23 benchmark, results are close to each other, and we can’t clearly say if one setting is better or it’s a margin error.
PCMark 10 is reacting to memory performance. However, on our memory kits, differences are not so high. We can still see the pattern of higher performance in Essentials preset on the 16GB kit and higher in Productivity on the 32GB kit.
3D benchmarks from UL are not showing significant performance differences among all results. We can still tell that the 16GB kit is slightly faster than the 32GB in all tests. I wouldn’t expect that, as usually, dual-rank memory is a bit better.
In VRMark, we can see almost the same, except the Orange benchmark, where the dual-rank kit is slightly faster.
In Final Fantasy XV and Superposition benchmarks at higher display resolution, we can again see that the 16GB kit is a bit faster. It’s nothing really significant but can translate it into a single FPS more.
In popular games like Shadow of the Tomb Raider or FarCry 5, we usually see high FPS differences. Our today’s results are quite mixed. In the Tomb Raider, we can see up to 4FPS difference between the lowest and the highest frequency RAM. In FarCry 5, this difference raises to 10FPS what is already a quite big performance gain. We can also see that dual-rank RAM is a bit faster at the same frequency and main timings in games.
Patriot Viper Elite II is quite fast, even though XMP profiles are not showing that. Of course, we can find faster RAM, but it will be harder to match the price tag. Overall, the Viper Elite II is well-balanced RAM that should meet users’ needs.
