DDR4
memory it's fast its power efficient. It's a
requirement if you want to pick up a fancy new CPU that needs it and you can learn all about it here, so with DDR4
available why would you want DDR3 anymore on top of all the other stuff that I just said DDR4 has four in it?
that's like one more than
DDR3, the answer is cost at the time of making this video
DDR4 is more expensive for a given capacity than DDR3 so for that reason many potential customers
will want to see it
justify its higher cost so welcome to our apples-to-apples
comparison of
DDR3 and DDR4.
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So let's introduce our test platform, shall we?
There are no CPUs on the market that support both DDR3 and DDR4, at least consumer ones.
So we have to be pretty careful to reduce variables and make this comparison as fair as possible.
It starts with the processor, so we chose two CPUs based on the same
Haswell microarchitecture
from intel the core I7 4790k and the core I7 5820k.
Then we proceeded to disable two of the cores on the 5820k and clock them both at straight
4.4 gigahertz with no turbo boost so neither of them would have any raw clock speed advantage. One thing
we couldn't do anything about is the difference in cache size,
but this is as close as we could get to a level playing field for the CPU next up is motherboards.
We've got two gigabyte gaming 5 Motherboards the Z97X
gaming 5 and the X99 gaming 5. We were looking for feature
equivalent boards to use for both chips and both of these have a very similar loadout with Sata Express,
10 gigabit M.2 drive support, amplified onboard audio qualcomm killer networking,
similar CPU power designs with gigabyte's all digital implementation and of course a
sexy matte black and red color scheme that I find myself caring about probably far too much.
The X99 version does have some extras to go along with its higher price: a more advanced sound processor, 3 and 4 way SLI
support and some led lighting accents including on the heatsink and the i/o shield to make it easier to plug things in in the dark.
But enough about that, you guys want to know about the memory we're using, right?
Representing DDR3 at up to the highest JEDEC speed 2133 megahertz with enhanced timings,
we've got a 16 gig dual channel kit of XPG V1 memory resplendent in an anodized
red finish and representing DDR4 at up to the highest JEDEC DDR4 speed
2400 Megahertz, although higher speeds will be coming, a 16 gig quad channel kit of ADATA' s
new DDR4 XPG Z1 series with an updated aggressive looking heat spreader also featuring an
anodized red finish.
So huge thanks to ADATA for providing us with these modules for testing. Even the brand new DDR4 modules
operated flawlessly throughout the benchmarking process and for that matter so did the motherboards, I'm really impressed especially with the
X99 Gaming 5 this one has made a lot of progress.
Gigabyte's drop'in Bios updates like that and the stability of it is much much improved over X99 at launch.
So yeah, everything just kind of went smoothly for a change. Anyway speaking of the benchmarking process
I guess that's what's next, so I'm gonna show you three different scenarios here. First is
DDR3 dual channel. Next is DDR4 Dual channel.
So we have a very direct apples to apples comparison
between the two memory technologies at a variety of speeds and timings and
finally to show a very best case scenario for Modern DDR4
I threw in a set of results with the RAM
overclocked to 3 gigahertz in quad-Channel mode, the configuration that most folks running, DDR4
capable processors will be running until broadwell comes to the mainstream desktop in dual channel only sometime next year.
Now synthetic benchmarks are where DDR4 should be able to really flex its muscles. These AIDA64
benches are designed to show us the upper most limits of the
theoretical performance of the memory subsystem of a PC in our apples-to-apples test
DDR4 delivers better performance in read's than DDR3 but actually worse write and
latency results making this a bit of a wash.
But in its full quad channel configuration our high speed DDR4 is untouchable here. Next up is real-world
non-gaming results. Multi-threaded rendering and our 7-zip compression and decompression
benchmarks are a good way to show off the performance of modern CPUs with lots of processing cores and
high-speed memory is needed to keep all of those cores fed, so something to note here
Is that while the performance scaling with better memory might not look very impressive the LGA 2011-3
socket is likely to be with us for a few years and has CPUs available for it already with up to
18 cores, so while the extra bandwidth even in quad-channel
isn't needed for this artificial quad-core that we created here,
there are ways to kit out a board like this so that it's much more likely that that extra memory bandwidth would be used.
Which leads to our final set of benchmarks. Games.
I only ended up running a couple of games the canned
benchmark in Tomb Raider at these settings and my custom run at the end of Bioshock Infinite at these settings because the results here
don't leave much for me to interpret. Even going all the way down to DDR3 1333
Megahertz, so nearly the launch speed of DDR3 in Dual-channel
I couldn't create a situation where game performance was limited in any meaningful way by the
Memory Subsystem on it a Haswell based CPU with only 4 Cores
So in conclusion,
while it might be worthwhile from a platform point of view to invest in DDR4 for your six core or eight core
processor since you don't really have a choice if you want the latest
CPUs. If you're a normal consumer who doesn't really need the extra cores it looks like LGA 1150 with its ancient
DDR3 memory still has a lot of life left in it and given how
unconstrained our haswell CPUs are even by very low speed DDR3
I think it's safe to say that the performance improvements
We can expect to see from Intel's upcoming broadwell desktop processors will be thanks to architectural improvements
not the use of DDR4
Guys like this video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment letting me know what you thought. Were you
expecting DDR4 in an apples-to-apples comparison to run away with it or were you expecting exactly the results you saw today.
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