A good question always is this one, does faster memory have a direct effect on CPU performance. Well, if the program is small enough to run in the memory. Very little. But even little differences can be measured. Let us demonstrate in the chart above.

So as you can see .. you can measure it alright .. but it's just such a small difference really.

WinRAR performance
One of the oldest applications in the book actually has a nice benchmark included in it. What's real nice about it is that it pretty sensitive towards system changes, such as memory. An excellent tool to have included into this memory test.

When we have WinRAR crunch some data we see the results become a little more flaky ... at default CAS 9 / 1600MHz we see 4.33 MB per second of performance.

PCMark Vantage
PCMark 05 is the latest version of the popular PCMark series. PCMark05 is an application-based benchmark and a premium tool for measuring overall PC performance. It uses portions of real applications instead of including very large applications or using specifically created code. This allows PCMark05 to be a smaller installation as well as to report very accurate results. As far as possible, PCMark05 uses public domain applications whose source code can be freely examined by any user. 

Info and download - Download!

With Vantage we can see the difference getting a little closer. Most people with current Core 2 duo and Phenom processors will have 800 MHz memory. You can see that results at the bottom of this chart. The wide variation of 800 to 1866 MHz and timings however does not show a lot of difference in the PCMark Vantage memory suite.