Our testing today will focus on the performance difference between a system running multiple 2GB dual channel kits with varying timings. Past testing has assured us that it is indeed worth it to pony up the extra dough for that extra gigabyte. What is important now is whether or not a small decrease in the timings of those chips is again worth your hard earned cash.

For the testing purposes, an Asus A8N-SLI deluxe board was setup with an AMD Opteron 165 processor, 2 x EVGA 7800GTCO Video Cards in SLI, a Hitachi 200GB SATA2 HDD, and a clean install of Windows XP SP2. The latest Chipset and video card drivers were used. The Platinum kit was run at 2-3-2-5, the Gold kit at 2-3-3-8, and the OEM kit at 3-3-3-8.  All kits were run at 1T.

Synthetic/Application Benchmarks

First up in our testing process will be the standard synthetic memory benchmark Sisoft Sandra.  

Now here's a surprise for sure.  The lower latency Platinum chips are actually outperformed in this synthetic benchmark by their cheaper Gold brethren (by the smallest of margins).  Let's keep in mind that the key word here is synthetic.  With Sandra typically only testing a small portion of the available RAM, it would be unwise for us to draw any conclusions at this point.

Next we will move on to a real world application benchmarking tool in World Bench.  World Bench runs a host of real applications in real time and tests how they perform through a series or actions similar to what you would run daily while using the program at home or at the office

Here things are more in line with what we would expect to see with the Platinum kit taking the lead ahead of both the Gold and OEM kit in all but one test.

Application benchmarks are great of course, be we all know that if you're looking to buy a kit of OCZ Platinum or Gold RAM it is not for your office PC, but for your gaming rig.  So let's move on to the gaming benchmarks that most of you have probably already skipped onto anyway!

Next Page: (Gaming Benchmarks)

Page 1: Introduction Page 2: Synthetic Benchmarks Page 3: Gaming Benchmarks Page 4: Level Loading; Overclocking Page 5: Conclusion