Bursting the Athlon 64 Memory bandwidth bubble
 

Do you need high speed memory to have the fastest A64 on the block? We don´t think so, we think having memory faster then PC3200 is overkill and does not improve real world performance one bit. We put our money where our mouth is and prove that Gamers don't need expensive memory to enjoy fast Athlon 64 performance.

http://www.madshrimps.be/gotoartik.php?articID=325

WOW i would have expected a much bigger difference!

would be interesting to see if there would be differences in other apps like encoding, and also have a pp4 comparison.

Great job on the test though :super:

:super: article

Is the human eye capable of noticing the difference between 85 or 93 FPS ?

24 FPS is actually enough to trick the eye for movies to be "smooth"; PC games however sit more comfortable at 60FPS; and First Person Shooters can benefit from >100FPS, although this depends from person to person.

anyway, noticing the difference between anything >60FPS is in my humble opinion very hard, the advantage of having a higher average FPS is that you also get higher frame rates when there is a lot of action on screen and there is a dip in framerate

:D

low latency (2-2-2 timings) is the magic word for A64...
you don't need all that bandwidth :D

and even that is disputable; CL2.5 3-3-7 seems to be holding up quite good also :)

very nice article :ws:

someone also compared the effects of cas and ras to cas on XS a few months ago and his results were comparable.

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...ad.php?t=48634

I would also like to see how bandwidth affect encoding with popular software like DVD Shrink and TMPEG encoder. Any chance someone can try this?

I am now able to run the GSkill @ 1.5-2-2-5 with 3 Volt 200 Mhz; hardly any difference with the exception of dropping Sandra mem bandwidth on benchmark; otherwise, there is no performance gain to speak of.

Still bandwidth >6200mb/s; too bad my DVD Shrink is in the Prescott system, otherwise, I will burn a copy DVD disks to test the speed ..... then again, it also depends on HD.

While the premise of the article is interesting, the testing is flawed. 'gamer' set out to prove that increasing memory bandwidth is unnecessary to gamers so he selected two HTTs while holding timings the same. Good start. Then for testing purposes, he/she chooses 2 graphics limited games(Halflife not as much) AND runs them at 10x7 and 12x8 *maximum quality* to add insult to injury! Even with older games(read Quake3) this taxes the graphics card more than the CPU. The article simply reillustrates that those 2 games are graphics limited and abandons the premise of memory/cpu bandwidth.

'Gamer' could you retest using 6x4, possibly 8x6, using a less graphics limited game with *minimal* graphics settings to truly test memory/cpu bandwidth? I am certainly interested in the findings.

in my humble opinion, I don't believe we "gamers" only play the most recent games and that's all. As you can see from the responses above, we re-encode DVDs & video and play many, many other games & applications.

Thanks :)