DDR4 Haswell-E Scaling Review: 2133 to 3200 with G.Skill, Corsair, ADATA and Crucial
by Ian Cutress on February 5, 2015 10:10 AM EST2x GTX 770 SLI Gaming
Next up is a pair of MSI GTX 770 Lightning graphics cards in SLI, which may be more akin to the typical Haswell-E system. Our goal here is to provide enough frames for a full on 120 Hz or 144 Hz refresh rate, ideally at the minimum frame rate level in modern games while still attempting maximum quality settings at 1080p. Even for this system it will be a hard task, and it will be interesting to see how the different memory configurations help with this.
Dirt 3: Average FPS
Dirt 3: Minimum FPS
Bioshock Infinite: Average FPS
Bioshock Infinite: Minimum FPS
Tomb Raider: Average FPS
Tomb Raider: Minimum FPS
Sleeping Dogs: Average FPS
Sleeping Dogs: Minimum FPS
Conclusions at 1080p/Max with two GTX 770s
Similarly to the single GPU arrangement, the only deficit worth mentioning is that of the minimum frame rate in F1 2013. Here we see 114-115 FPS on all the DDR4-2133 C15 kits, compared to 124-126 FPS on everything else except DDR4-2400 4x8 which had 120 FPS. This is a bigger 10% boost from choosing something other than the JEDEC standard.
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jabber - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
Crikey...I'm still on 16GB of DDR2 ECC! I feel old.foxtrot1_1 - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
If you're still running DDR2 it's probably not the RAM that's holding your system back.nathanddrews - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
Clearly. It's rather sad to see how little impact RAM has on performance... which begs the question of who is buying this stuff? Is the only strength stability during overclocking?III-V - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
Well Haswell-E users are tied to DDR4, so yeah there's that :)Of course, that's not what you were talking about. Memory bandwidth can have a big effect on certain workloads. IGPs need a bit of it (tapers off hard after 2133 MHz), but I know programs like WinZip and 7-Zip love memory bandwidth. There's certainly a lot of server and HPC workloads that love it too, but for most users, you're certainly right -- it's not worth it at the moment and may not really ever be a concerning bottleneck.
r3loaded - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
You mean to say you've not bought a single computer since Core 2? Damn!Murloc - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
well do you really need additional CPU power?My overclocked E8500 (with stock cooler) was a beast, there was so much headroom, and I didn't change computer because of it.
Right now I'm on a i5 750 from 2009 or something and it's totally fine. Also my GTX 275 still handles games in full hd just fine although not at max settings and it also becomes hot and only has DX10 so it's obsolete.
So after 6 years, it's only the GPU that could use upgrading, the CPU/RAM part is not bottlenecking anything.
Well not having sata 6 and that limiting my SSD is the one bad thing. I don't have any USB3 pendrives so I don't miss that.
It's technology and power consumption making my CPU/chipset obsolete rather than performance.
Guspaz - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
I'm still running a first-gen i7 (Nehalem) as my work computer, and it's still plenty snappy. I've got 12GB of RAM in the thing, and whatever I do have in the way of performance limitations would largely be resolved by sticking an SSD in there.svan1971 - Sunday, February 8, 2015 - link
Get the PX-AG256M6e say goodbye to sata 3 limitations. I put one in an old x58 board and its amazing what a 6 year old 3.6 oc'd i7 can do.mikato - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link
Nice post. I had an E7300 system and I had already upgraded the GPU to a GTX 760 and maxed out memory. It was somewhat slow in the newer games I played (Call of Duty), then I bought an E8500 on ebay and put that in and overclocked it finding a sweet spot, but it was still not quite as fast as I wanted. The poor optimization of COD Ghosts was partly to blame, but I ended up redoing the whole system at that point.I do use an i7-950 Bloomfield at work still and it does just fine.
jabber - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
Just in clarify, I'm running a dual quad core 3.33Ghz Xeon setup. Still keeps up with a i7 in a lot of cases. They cost peanuts too.