Synthetic Benching Suites

  SiSoft Sandra 2014

For all of our testing including gaming, we used our 240GB Kingston Hyper-X SSD. Although there are no average framerate differences running games on a SSD versus a HDD, we wanted consistency and identical conditions for all of our tests.

We also limited our game benchmark suite to ten games; our eight very latest games and two older games that we also benchmarked since Core i7-920. Before we get to gaming, we want to see exactly where the Haswell and Ivy Bridge architectures differ, and there is no better tool than SiSoft’s Sandra 2014.

There are several versions of Sandra 2014, including a free version of Sandra Lite that anyone can download and use. It is highly recommended! SiSoft’s Sandra 2014 was released November 25, 2013. It has quite a few improvements over Sandra 2013 and recently there was a service pack released as well as updated for Nvidia’s new Maxwell architecture.

Here is what is new in version 2014:

* New CPU benchmark: Scientific Analysis – 3 common algorithms: GEMM (matrix multiply), FFT (fast Fourier transform), N-Body simulation – 2 precision: single/float, double/FP64 – SSE2, SSE3, AVX, FMA support where possible – same workload as GP scientific analysis benchmark – to directly compare CPU vs. GPGPU performance.

* New GP benchmark: Scientific Analysis – 3 common algorithms: GEMM (matrix multiply), FFT (fast Fourier transform), N-Body simulation – 2 precision: single/float, double/FP64 – 2 interfaces: CUDA, OpenCL (with DirectX ComputeShader to come) – not using any vendor specific library like cuBLAS, cuFFT, MKL, etc. – same workload as CPU scientific analysis benchmark – to directly compare CPU vs. GPGPU performance.

* Updated System benchmark: Overall Score – Replaced GP crypto with financial analysis (now that most CPUs have crypto HWA support there is no point doing crypto on GPGPU) – Updated weights to match modern devices (mobile, laptop, desktop and server)

* Updated CPU benchmark: Arithmetic – New libraries for Whetstone SSE3 / SSE4.1 / AVX – 2 precision: single/float, double/FP64 – float score is geometric mean of both float and double (was just double before) * Updated cache/memory benchmark: latency – measure L0 cache latency – data and code caches * Updated cache/memory benchmark: bandwidth – measure L0 cache bandwidth

First we run the 2014 Sandra benchmark suite with the ECS Golden Z87 motherboard and Core i7-4770K as in all of our benches at 4.2GHz. Our charts comparing the individual benchmarks are here as well as in the performance summary for easy cross comparison. Here are results with the Kingston Predator RAM at the default 1600MHz. 10.48kPT is the total value assigned by Sandra 2014 as the final score.

Here is the Processor arithmetic benchmark with the Predator RAM at 1600MHz:

Now it’s the Kingston Predator RAM’s turn at 2800MHz at the same settings, and we get a higher overall score, 10.87 kPT. Here are the Dhrystone and Whetstone benchmarks at 2800MHz:

Here is a summary comparison chart including some of the Sandra highlights comparing the Kingston Predator RAM at 1600MHz versus at 2800MHz and using the same settings.  “Wins” are in Bold type. The higher RAM speeds makes a difference in the synthetic benchmarks.

PC Mark Vantage

PC Mark Vantage was developed primarily for Vista and it has been superseded by PC Mark 7.

We are using the Advanced Edition of PCMark Vantage. As with all of our tests, we use 2x4GB Kingston HyperX Predator RAM. The only differences are that we run at 1600MHz first on Haswell and score 25364. Here are the 4770K’s results at 2800mhz, nearly 2,000 points higher. There is a noticeable difference between the scores with Predator RAM at 2800MMHz winning in every metric over the same RAM at 1600MHz although settings are otherwise identical.

Final Scores: 25364 at 1600MHz to 27342 at 2800MHz.

We will keep our settings and hardware the same and now run the detailed tests of the basic version of PCMark 7.

PCMark 7

We are testing at the same default settings that we tested with PC Mark Vantage. Even the free basic version has some very detailed test results. First up we feature the Predator RAM at the Haswell default 1600MHz. And now the results with Profile 1’s 2800MHz RAM clocks. The results: We scored 6755 at 1600MHz compared with 6886 at 2800MHz the same HyperX Predator RAM.

Will this small increase hold true for gaming? Before we look at gaming differences, we need to look at more benchmarks including real world applications that many of us use daily, including calculation, file copying, SSD testing, encoding video, multi-tasking, image editing and gaming.