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Unread 11-15-2003, 08:21 PM   #2
Cathar
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Join Date: Sep 2002
Location: Melbourne, Australia
Posts: 2,538
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Well, out here in the real world, synthetic streamlined burst memory bandwidth tests mean jack.

The Sandra and PC-Mark memory tests fall so far short of reality that they are a total joke. All they are, are just hand-coded assembler loops that pull/push data in the most optimised fashion that basically negates any effect of memory latency due to issuing data-cache-line prefetch commands that pre-loads the L1/L2 caches with information while the CPU is doing something else.

Basically they are measuring degenerate best-possible-case scenarios, and we all know how often they occur.

Business win-stone just execute tightly-loops scripts that mostly operate out of L2 cache, or pull in large sequential batches of data, which again is largely a faulty measure of performance.

3DMark2001 is perhaps the first real representative benchmark application in their list, and despite being somewhat video card speed dependent, still shows low latency memory as coming out in front.

Aquamark, which is an almost wholly video card dependent benchmark, still shows a significant win to lower latency.

Quake 3, which is largely CPU dependent nowadays, shows a good benefit to lower latency, and the highly video card dependent UT2, still shows a win to low latency.

i.e. the only real tests there that show any real benefit are the extremely artificial bandwidth-only penis-measurement tests which do not reflect upon reality.

Working in transaction based applications as my real job where neither artificial bandwidth acceleration, nor L2 cache-bound scenarios exist, I can tell you that the benefits of using lower latency memory is quite extreme.

Sorry, the whole article seems to me to be more like an infomercial, with carefully chosen and crafted test conditions, and then in the conclusion talking about "beginners who just want something that works would do well with the `high speed' memory" as they're "easier to setup".

How hard is it to plug in a low latency memory stick as opposed to a high memory MHz stick, one needs to ask oneself.
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