Benchmarks
Let's fire up some benchmarks. This first bechmarks was done with the help of SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software. Sandra provides similar level of information to Norton SI, Quarterdeck WinProbe/Manifest, etc. The Win32 version is 32-bit and comes in both ANSI (legacy for Windows 98/Me systems) and native Unicode (Windows NT4/200X/.Net) formats. The Win64 version is 64-bit and comes in native Unicode format.

Do note that all the SANDRA benchmarks are synthetic and thus are may not tally with real-life performance. The latter stands for whatever your environment is, i.e. which applications you run with what amount of data and so on. It is up to you to decide whether what Sandra measures is what you want to measure.

• Download SANDRA (a special Guru3D.com edition).

The results shown above is the measured memory bandwidth in MB/sec that the module delivers, to the left the normal (standard) mainboard RAM timing settings and to the right aggressive RAM timings. As you can see DDR400 will get you over 3000MB/sec bandwidth.

So let's see how bandwidth related to game performance, after all this site is targeted at you, the gamer. And although the difference is not something to write home about it does influence gaming somewhat. The results below where done with a GeForce4 Ti 4600. I did not install the newer 40.xx series detonator drivers here yet, but you can add about 1000 points just by installing that revision. Furthermore I did not include the results from DDR400. Weird you might add .. let me explain, To achieve DDR running at 400 MHz with the current mainboard you need to increase the FSB. Now your FSB is related to your CPU multiplier and thus clock-speed. By increasing the FSB the clock frequency of your CPU will be higher. To achieve DDR400 we need to set the FSB at 150 MHz (600 MHz Quad pumped bus) This would influence the benchmarks in a subjective way as they would not only represent testing memory efficiency but also a higher CPU clockspeed. Example, the results with an increased FSB and running DDR400 would get the 3D Mark results well over 12.000 3D Marks.

As you can see a 66 MHz difference is good for about ~500 points in this system.