Synthetic Benching Suites

SiSoft Sandra 2014

For all of our testing, including gaming, we used our 2TB Toshiba 7200 rpm hard drive. All four of our premium Kingston 240GB HyperX SSDs are currently being used in building our FCAT (Frame Capture Analysis Tool). There are no average framerate differences running games on a SSD versus from a HDD. Although many synthetic benchmarks will score lower using a HDD, our results are completely consistent across all benching, and the performance differences will be similar for HDD- and for SSD-based PCs.

We have limited our game benchmark suite to ten games; our eight very latest games and two older games that we have benchmarked for about 5-6 years. Before we get to gaming, we want to see exactly where performance varies with RAM speeds grades, and there is no better tool for this 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 there are regular service packs released to always keep it up to date.

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 4.0GHz, first with the FURY RAM, then the Beast and finally, Predator – in increasing speed grades. Our charts comparing the individual benchmarks are here as well as in the performance summary for easy cross comparison.

Here are the results with the Kingston FURY 1866MHz RAM at its default speed. 8.73 kPT is the total value assigned by Sandra 2014 as the final score.

Here is the Processor arithmetic benchmark with the Kingston FURY 1866MHz RAM:

Now it’s the 16GB of Kingston Beast RAM’s turn at 2133MHz with the same settings. We get a solidly higher overall score, 10.87 kPT, much of which is due to having twice the amount of RAM compared with both the faster and the slower 8GB kits.

Here are the Dhrystone and Whetstone benchmarks at 2800MHz:

Now it’s the 8GB Kingston Predator RAM’s turn at 2800MHz using the same settings, but this time, we only get a very slightly higher overall score than FURY’s 8.73 with 8.76 kPT.

Here are the Dhrystone and Whetstone benchmarks at 2800MHz:

Here is a summary comparison chart including some of the Sandra highlights comparing the FURY, the Beast and the Kingston Predator RAM at their stock speed grades using identical settings. The higher RAM speeds made only a slight difference in the synthetic benchmarks. And you pay nearly three times more for it over FURY.

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 FURY, 2x8GB Predator, and 2x4GB Beast RAM. As settings and the rest of the hardware remains unchanged, the only performance differences should come from the DDR3 modules.

Here are results with the Kingston FURY 1866MHz RAM at its default speed.

Now it’s the 16GB of Kingston Beast RAM’s turn at 2133MHz at the same settings

Now it’s the 8GB Kingston Predator RAM’s turn at 2800MHz at the same settings

Final Scores: 12088 at Fury’s 1833MHz to 12654 at 2133MHz for 16GB Beast to 11555 for Predator‘s 8GB of superfast 2800MHz RAM. There can be some advantages from using faster RAM that may be overshadowed by just using more RAM.

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

Here are results with the Kingston FURY 1866MHz RAM at its default speed.

The results:

• 8GB of Kingston HyperX FURY at 1866MHz scores 4179
  
• 16GB of Kingston Beast at 2133MH scores 4472
• 8GB of Kingston Predator at 2800MHz scores 4299.

Will these increases 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, encoding video, multi-tasking, image editing and gaming.