Crucial Ballistix Tracer 4GB DDR3 Memory Kit Review
Benchmarks Used
PCMark Vantage
If you are familiar with Futuremark, famous for their 3DMark range of gaming benchmark, then you should know that PCMark is also designed by them. But the difference ends there. Although 3DMark is a synthetic 3D benchmark, PCMark is a benchmark based on real world scenarios. It runs real world tests to test each component in your system. These include CPU, memory, storage and video card. The combined result is reported as a PCMark Score. In our benchmarking in this review, I only run the Memory tests.
Everest 5.30
Everest is another well-known benchmarking software in the enthusiast world. Here we used the various memory tests available from the Everest suite.
SANDRA 2010 SP1
SANDRA, short for the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant is an information & diagnostic utility. It provides a lot of information about every hardware and software component in your PC. It also provides various benchmarks. Here we used the memory bandwidth test and reported the aggregate memory bandwidth.
LameXP Audio Encoding
LameXP is highly multi-threaded audio encoding application. The way multi-threading works is that this software assigns each track to be encoded to an individual core. As an example, say you are encoding 4 tracks and have a quad core processor. Instead of waiting for first track to complete encoding to start the encoding of the second track, this software will instead assign each track to a core. LameXP is a graphical front-end for the LAME MP3, Ogg Vorbis and Nero AAC audio encoders. Supported input types are Wave, MP3, MP2, OGG/Vorbis, FLAC, MP4/AAC, AC3, DTS, WavPack, Musepack, TTA, Speex, Monkey’s Audio, Shorten, ALAC and WMA. It also reads M3U, PLS and ASX playlists as well as Cuesheets.
For this test, I used 30 WAV files obtained from my collection of Gladiator and The Villagesoundtrack CDs and converted them to mp3 using the LAME encoder with maximum quality/q0 settings.
Half Life 2 Lost Coast
We used the in-built benchmark utility for our gaming tests. The following settings were used:
