Performance
Performance has been tested on the Intel Coffee Lake platform which contains the i7-8086K, 6-core processor, ASUS Maximus XI Gene motherboard, Sapphire Pulse RX Vega 56 graphics card and Crucial P1 1TB SSD with installed Windows 10 x64, and the latest updates.
As usual, we will start with AIDA64 Memory and Cache benchmark, which is probably the best application to check memory bandwidth and latency.
Our comparison includes overclocking results and settings at which the Silicon Power XPower Turbine DDR4-3200 was stable using XMP settings.
AIDA64 bandwidth results are about as high as expected. DDR4-3200 is optimal for nearly everything. Higher frequency of course helps, but we see it mostly in synthetic benchmarks like AIDA64. PCMark 10 is already showing a lower difference between each setting. Of course, if we compare DDR4-2666 to DDR4-3200 or higher, then it’s already significant.
Rendering benchmarks can’t show the full advantage of RAM. It’s an environment where high memory capacity counts more than its speed. We can see that Cinebench is reacting on memory performance, but the difference is not so visible as in other benchmarks.
Let’s move to graphics tests based on popular 3D benchmarks from UL(previously Futuremark).
3DMark and VRMark are showing mostly differences in CPU and Physics tests. Total score or FPS is going up with memory performance, but if we played games based on these benchmarks, then we wouldn’t see if the memory is at DDR4-3200 or higher clock. Simply, the XMP profile works well.
More demanding 3D benchmarks are showing similar results. DDR4-3200 seems like a perfect speed as we pay for the performance which we can use in games. Above this point, price is going up much more than the expected performance.
In new games at lower screen resolution, memory can add a couple of FPS. We can see up to 7 FPS between DDR4-2666 and DDR4-3200. It’s already a significant difference which many gamers may notice, especially when the lowest FPS is below 30.
On the next page, we will show a bit of overclocking as many users always want more than they paid for.
