Robberbaron and (cf)Eclipse preach the truth about A64's and memory

Alright. The point of this thread is to dispel the myths, rumors, misconceptions, and insecurities people have in regards to 1T vs 2T timings and memory speed. Hopefully this will cause less threads asking for "memory that does 1T" and people worrying over the 4x double sided dimms issue.

This benchmark is with a Socket 754 Clawhammer at 2.5GHz.

One setting I used was 10x250MHz 1:1. The other was 11x227 5:6 with 192MHz ram speed.


And Sciencemark 2.0:

10x250 1T
Mol Dyn        929.63
Primidoria     811.37
cipher bench  1008.29
blas bench    1192.42

10x250 2T
Mol Dyn        833.31
Primidoria     804.80
cipher bench   984.38
blas bench    1012.97


11x227 1T
Mol Dyn        953.12
Primidoria     859.01
cipher bench  1158.53
blas bench    1199.84

11x227 2T
Mol Dyn        830.57
Primidoria     850.04
cipher bench  1131.82
blas bench    1185.05

So aside from memory specific benchmarks, we see the greatest performance hit from latency and memory bandwidth in gaming and Molecular Dynamics.
In 10x250, we lose 3% Aquamark performance when switching to 2T.
In 10x227, we lose 4.5% Aquamark performance when switching to 2T. Not a very big deal if getting 2 gigs means having to use 2T.

Counterstrike lost a relatively small amount of framerate, especially since I ran the benchmark with a +15 LOD bias, 640x480 resolution, and bare minimum detail. To give you an idea of image quality:


Yeah. Ouch. So in higher resolutions, when the GPU is actually stressed, I don't think you'll even feel the hit. Also, since many people are finding Socket 939 systems to be rewarding with their dual cores and dual channel and dual PCI-E, there will be even less of a hit due to the almost doubled write bandwidth.


As for molecular dynamics, well, hopefully if you're going to be messing with that, your university will back you up with a nice computer anyway.

ALL RIGHT! I'm finally done. First off, here's the raw data for those who like numbers more than silly graphs

The rig that was used:

DFI Lanparty UT NF3-250gb
Mobile Athlon 64 3700+
XFX 6800GT
2x512mb Crucial Ballistix pc3200
WD 80 + 250gb HDD
assorted cooling


I chose to use 3 ram speeds while holding the cpu speed constant. The settings are as follows:

Setting 1
HTT/FSB = 250
CPU Multi = 11
CPU Mhz = 2750
RAM ratio = 1:01
RAM Mhz = 250
Timings = 2.5-2-2-10
HT link multi = 3

Setting 2
HTT/FSB = 229
CPU Multi = 12
CPU Mhz = 2748
RAM ratio = 1:01
RAM Mhz = 229
Timings = 2.5-2-2-10
HT link multi = 3

Setting 3
HTT/FSB = 229
CPU Multi = 12
CPU Mhz = 2748
RAM ratio = 5:06
RAM Mhz = 183
Timings = 2-2-2-10
HT link multi = 3

Then, as part of the quest, RB and I tried each setting with 1T and 2T, to show how the latency hit (about 10-15% for me) is insignificant, thus why the graphs have 6 sets of data for each bench.


I will order the benches from what I feel is most "synthetic" to least. First up:

Everest memory tests
Nothing to really comment on here.. although I thought the difference in latency between 250x11 and 229x12 at the same timings was quite curious.







SiSoft Sandra:
This is.... very very very cpu dependant. Bandwidth and latency has no effect on the CPU scores (go figure! haha)







ScienceMark:
This is one of those benches that may or may not be useful to you, depending on what you do. Those people who run this kind of stuff.. well, it's obvious, ram speed does not have much of an effect on benchmark







3dmark05:
Self-explanitory. Final score is very gpu dependant, thus why there's cpu score, which I have included
It seems that it's somewhat memory speed sensitive, but only when the ram speed drops below 200mhz, then it takes a decently large hit, but it's still pretty small when you consider a 17% drop from 250mhz at 1T to 183mhz at 2T






Aquamark:
Again, two parts, but this time I only included GFX and CPU into the graph. Check the raw data for the final score if you care.
This scales more normally with bandwidth than 3dmark does, but doesn't dramatically drop off. Still about the same 17-18% drop from 250mhz at 1T to 183mhz at 2T.






SuperPI
This is known to be very latency sensitive. Seems to have held up to it's repuation on that part






Cinebench
This is a useful tool for those who will plan on doing renditions of stuff. Bandwidth and latency doesn't seem to effect it in the least






Real World apps:
This one takes a bit more explaining. In Terragen, I made up and saved a world, so that I would be rendering the same thing every time. This is what I rendered.
For the music conversion, I converted the Delerium - Poem album from 256kb/s MP3 to 192kb/s Ogg Vorbis with dBpoweramp 10.1.
Both programs had a timer, and indicated how long the task took to complete. I recorded this time.

From this data in conjucntion with the Cinebench results, it is obvious that rendering is very CPU based, and shows no gains from various memory speeds and latencies. Music conversion is the same way, with results that did not vary outside of 2 seconds.








WELL! there you have it. From this, and baron's results, it seems that the typical 'benchmarks' are the only programs that see any difference from memory speed and latency.
Games show a small difference, but nothing really amazing.
Music conversion.. yeah
Rendering programs are entirely CPU limited.

Basically unless you overclock hardcore or time everything you do.
You won't notice any difference!

Originally Posted by Borgschulze

Basically unless you overclock hardcore or time everything you do.
You won't notice any difference!

even if you do overclock hardcore, you might want 2t timings if it meant more headroom and then meant more performance.

Originally Posted by mikelz85

even if you do overclock hardcore, you might want 2t timings if it meant more headroom and then meant more performance.

Possibly, maybe I can get more out of this CPU with 2T Command Rate...
Maybe hit 300HTT stable? That would be nice.

or just use a ram divider. this is the purpose of this. my results will be even more dramatic than baron's, showing very very little difference between memory speeds on the arguably more limited single channel setup. if this is how small the difference is with s754, take away any bandwidth limitation and you have s939

Sticky!!! Get the glue out guys...

I would like to see the same numbers on a fairly newer processor such as the Venice or San Deigo Please. I know you guys out their love your 754's but thats old news to me

is newark new enough?
just hold out like another hour or two... benching this much takes fooorrrrreverrrr


also, those of you with s939 who feel like doing this, feel free to

I just want to see what the impacts would have with Dual Channel Ram, the newer memory controller, SSE3 if their is an impact etc etc.

Originally Posted by USMC2Hard4U

I just want to see what the impacts would have with Dual Channel Ram, the newer memory controller, SSE3 if their is an impact etc etc.

Well the dual channel will have the most impact. Taking away the write bandwidth limitation will remove most damage from 2T I suspect.

sse2 is known to actually decrease performance in some cases.. like HL2

Originally Posted by (cf)Eclipse

sse2 is known to actually decrease performance in some cases.. like HL2

really? Why is this?

That's pretty funny...

not sure. i've long denouced sse1/2/3 as being pretty useless.. for amd at least. intel can actually take advantage of it with it's higher clock speeds and less efficient x87 FP unit
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets...spx?i=2330&p=5

in the bottom part. it's very very insignificant, but there

very nice writeup so far, i cant wait to see all of (cf)'s bar graphs and stuff!

done my part

Nice work guys. The thread title is sorta tacky but nice work nonetheless j\k.

Originally Posted by USMC2Hard4U

I just want to see what the impacts would have with Dual Channel Ram, the newer memory controller, SSE3 if their is an impact etc etc.

The dual channel RAM will of course have the most impact on performance because the memory controller isn't really improved that much over the 90nm Winchester cores. In fact in certain cases its a little slower. SSE3 wont help at all except in the few cases your running an application that has been coded to use it.

Originally Posted by (cf)Eclipse

not sure. i've long denouced sse1/2/3 as being pretty useless.. for amd at least. intel can actually take advantage of it with it's higher clock speeds and less efficient x87 FP unit
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets...spx?i=2330&p=5

in the bottom part. it's very very insignificant, but there

SSE2 can be coded to do things much faster then x87 can. AMD has a stronger x87 FPU unit but that doesn't mean its better to use x87 over SSE2. The lack of support for SSE2 is just one of the reasons why the Athlon XP usually fell behind the Pentium 4 in application performance because alot of the applications today have been optimized for SSE2. x87 wont even be supported in the new Longhorn OS when it comes out. I can't see how SSE2 would have any kind of real impact on performance for gaming that would actually matter. Its benefits far outweigh any negative effects just like HyperThreading on the Pentium 4.

SSE2 is critical to Folding@home. So in certain apps it is very important.

*cries over wasted money on expensive tccd* very nice job tho, quite thorough. however, noone seems to go past 250mhz. id liek to see 200mhz 2-2-2-5 vs 275mhz 2.5-3-3-7, I feel the relaxed latencies required to go over ~230 dont pay off till 260mhz+, if this were possible, I feel it would give a better result. If msi ever releases a proper bios for my mobo, perhaps I will try and run similar tests. my cpu does 2.75ghz fine, so I coudl do 250x11 with ram at 208, and 275x10 to take the cpu out of the question. that is if in fact its a bios issue and not just the cpu's inability to handle high ht.