Gskill Sniper 12GB X58 ram kit Review

Memory by leeghoofd @ 2011-06-06

At the latest CeBIT 2011, GSkill announced their new Gamer Orientated Sniper series. Sporting a heatspreader that looks like a firearm. Coincidence or not,  Gigabyte chose a sortlike military makeover for their new X58 G1 series motherboards. Even though main focus lately is on socket 1155, it is nice to see some new products too for the aging socket 1366. Todays reviewed kit is Gskills high end and high capacity 1600Mhz CL7 12GBkit. Consisting out of a triple 4GB dimm kit. Rated to run at a nice C7-8-7-24 SPD timings.

 

 

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Test setup and tests

Our test setup consists of the following parts :

Asus Rampage III Formula X58 board (bios 0505)
Intel 990X @4Ghz, uncore 3600mhz watercooled
Asus GTX480, 266.58WHQL drivers
Windows 7 64Bit Professional

 

12GB 1600 CL7-8-7-21 versus 12GB 1600 CL9-9-9-24 :

 

The Sniper 12Gb rams were tested at stock clocks vs a simulated Sniper kit running at 1600 9-9-9-24 1T :

Why this test you might ask ? Well to show you how worthwhile or not, it is to invest in a high end ram kit. Most high quantity ram kits are running far looser main timings on the rams... though isn't the performance loss too much ? Or isn't it as big as some say...

 

 

Both superPi 1M and Wprime 32M being very brief tests, the performance difference between both settings is minimal. With the longer SuperPi 32M the CL7 Snipers gain over 6 secs versus the Cas Latency 9 kit. Wprime remains too CPU dependant, so the difference is minimal and within the margin of error. 

 

 

The bandwith test of AIDA64 shows why the CL7 kit performs better. The READ and COPY numbers are significantly higher. How does this reflect in the rest of the test suite... as synthetic benchmarks don't always relfect real life performance.

 

 

A very small difference during the Futuremark 3D tests, in favour again of the CL7 version.

 

 

Multi Core cinebench getting a nice small boost to with the extra bandwith provided by the Sniper CL7 kit.

 

 

Encoding wise, it's logical that more bandwith reflects in more frames per second rendering. But the difference is nothing jawbreaking.

 

 

Gaming wise, tighter rams don't do much. time and time gain we see the same pattern. Better overclock your GPU and/or CPU to get more frames per second.

 

 

 

 

So conclusion for this page : CAS 7 is slightly faster and more productive then the CAS 9 version. Running the dimms at Command rate 1T didn't pose any problem at all... Now how do they clock...

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