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.

WinRAR is pretty fun to measure with and here we land at an application where memory bandwidth really matters, and that shows. The faster we have the memory frequency and bandwidth, the better the performance. 4600 KB/sec for the OCZ Blade kit.

If you compare that to say 1333 MHz memory kits, you'll notice that's a huge bump in performance. Makes sense as compressing data, is a memory thang.

Matroska x.264 movie encoding

x264 is a free library for encoding H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video streams. Encoding/transcoding to that format is one of the most intensive tasks a processor can perform. As such this probably is the best test of the entire review.  We encode a h.264 Dolby Digital 1080P trailer of 150 MB to Matroska x.264 with 5.1 channels AC3. It's compressed in such a way you can play it back with Haali media splitter and/or FFDSHOW codecs. We use handbrake software which is multi-core aware... the more processor cores it sees, the faster it can, and will transcode. This software also is a perfect benchmark for CPU and memory testing. I still have to do QX9770 tests for this benchmark, hence the lack of it's performance.

The displayed number is the number of frames rendered per second averaged out over the encoding process. The higher the number, the faster performance is.

Now surely there is a difference in-between low frequency and high frequency memory. Yet with less than a 1 FPS difference, that would not justify the cost of this memory whatsoever. But let's have a look at some games.