Ram speeds and Windows Experience Index

[GregH]

An irritating observation on my side :huh:... and before I start, I know that the WEI is not a great benchmark but nevertheless -

I run a Core i7 4770K CPU overclocked at 4.3Ghz and 8 GB 1600 Mhz Corsair Dominator RAM on timings of 8-8-8-24 using the Asus Maximus Hero Motherboard's XMP profile. My RAM WEI = 7.8

My son's PC uses a much older MSI Z778 G43 motherboard with a mid range Core i5 CPU and 8 GB 1600Mhz Corsair Dominator Ram with timings 9-9-9-24. His RAM WEI = 7.9

Both PC's are on Windows 7.

I swapped his RAM into my PC and still got a WEI of 7.8 - so I guess his older cheaper MSI MB is much better at memory control than my Asus MB?

 

[Mellon Head]

I doubt that it's a memory controller issue. It's probably just a quirk in Windows. A 0.1 score difference on a WEI is not significant in the real world.

I think if you ran a real benchmark on both machines, you would get different results. More like what you would expect to see.

 

[madcratebuilder]

I swapped his RAM into my PC and still got a WEI of 7.8 - so I guess his older cheaper MSI MB is much better at memory control than my Asus MB?

A 0.1 difference in WEI is insignificant. Tweaking the BIOS memory settings could get you that last 0.1, nothing to do with who manufactured the MB.

What's the wei without the XMP profile?

 

[GregH]

I did not try it without the XMP profile set. I did manually overclock my RAM from1600 to 1833 and it booted fine and took the WEI to 7.9 but the timings (set to auto) went from 8-8-8-24 to something like 13-15-15-35.

Dropping the CAS to 10, it refused to boot.

So I am back at 1600 for now, pondering a RAM upgrade to 16GB at either 2133mHz or 2400MHz with decent timings. I use my PC mainly for FSX which is very CPU and mem intensive so I figure that if I have spent the money on the CPU and Graphics card, may as well make sure the memory is not going to ever be the bottleneck.