What's your memory assessment speed?

So.. I din't have my new motherboard or CPU yet, but since the DDR3-1600 Vengeance kit (cmz4gx3m2a1600c9) arrived earlier this week I made a plan to test it in a friend's PC just in case it needed to be sent back, you never know... But now I have questions. :/

I didn't play with BIOS settings at all, not my PC and I was more concerned with simply running Memtest than anything else. But when I ran the 'winsat mem' command, with it running at 1333MHz 9-9-9-24 at 1.5v, it only scored 9100MB/s. For the record, the machine I tested it with was an Asus P8P67-M Pro with an i5-2500 (normal, not K edition).

My current DDR2-800 running at 880MHz 5-5-5-15 gets about 8400MB/s.. Surely the DDR3 should be a fair amount faster than that? Even at stock timings and 1333...?

Obviously, if you consider the fact I'm getting a 2500K and a Z68 board, I am definitely planning to play with overclocking... But I can't help but wonder how much I'll get out of it if it's starting off that low. Any sage advice from you DDR3 gurus?

Dave76 said:

Did it pass memtest86+?

Was all the RAM recognized in BIOS?
In the correct slots on the motherboard?

That is a low score for that RAM on that system, it should be up to double that or a bit more.
My guess would be check all the BIOS settings.

Yup, passed the test without any problems at all, so it's not faulty.. That was my largest concern, and also the reason for testing it in a friend's PC (I'm only getting my new board next month).

All 4GB were recognised fine in BIOS and Windows, I didn't play with any settings in the BIOS because it wasn't my computer and it was just a "put it in, see if it works" test. The friend in question doesn't have internet access and I didn't have CPU-z, so I couldn't figure out if it was in dual channel or not though.

I did grab the motherboard manual from the Asus site to check up on the RAM configuration though; and with the way the RAM was installed when we tested it, it was definitely not in dual channel mode. My friend put it in the A1 and A2 slots (the two slots from Channel A), whereas it should have been in A1 and B1 (one slot per Channels A and B).

But surely dual channel wouldn't really make a massive difference? I'm pretty sure it doesn't double the effective RAM read/write speeds though.. Maybe I'm just being paranoid though. I'll be ordering my MSI board next month, so maybe I should just wait and see what happens.

And I thought 6955 was good....hah