Performance
Performance has been tested on an Intel Kaby Lake platform based on i7 7700K processor and ASUS Maximus IX APEX. Processor for comparison reasons has been set to 4.2GHz. Since performance wise it’s the same as Skylake then our readers can easily compare results. In 3D benchmarks has been used EVGA GTX1080Ti FE graphics card. It’s a new addition as GTX980 was already old.
All tests were performed on Windows 10 Pro with the latest updates.
Let’s begin with AIDA64 Memory and Cache benchmark.
AIDA64 is well known diagnostic and benchmark software which is providing one of the best avalable memory tests.
Ballistix Sport LT memory is performing quite good considering lower frequency than most other memory kits in this comparison. However it’s clear that on Kaby Lake platform higher frequency always give much higher bandwidth results. Not all applications can use pure bandwidth so in next tests we will see how frequency affects performance and what else matters.
In HyperPi 32M we can see that not always higher frequency is the best. In this case we can see that Ballistix Sport LT which is dual rank memory is faster even than Geil Dragon DDR4-3333 which is single rank memory. Not all applications will show this performance gain because of memory ranks but it’s worth to know that memory performance is not always described by its frequency.
In Cinebench R15 which is rendering benchmark we can see that higher frequency is helping a bit but not so much. All who are rendering more often know that in this case higher memory capacity counts more than some MHz. Cinebench is not using much memory so we can’t really see that and the results are based mainly on the memory performance.
Futuremark benchmarks are the most popular and are showing us expected performance in new games and other applications.
3DMark Time Spy is demanding benchmark which reacts better on memory speed than Fire Strike. We still can’t see big difference in results between memory kits. 100-150 marks isn’t anything what will really affect our gaming experience. Of course when we are below 30FPS then everything counts. In this case better look at something like Ballistix Elite DDR4-3466 which will offer slightly better performance in games but also will cost more than similar capacity Ballistix Sport LT.
PCMark8 is showing about the same differences. Even though faster memory should affect general performance more then Intel Kaby Lake platform has already really fast memory controller and we simply won’t feel big performance gain from higher memory frequency.
Looking how memory performance affects users experience I can say that fast memory will mainly help in more demanding games while all who are using computers for work like rendering better pick lower frequncy but higher capacity memory kits.
