Application Tests
Application Tests
Here, we run through a suite of four (five, if you count 3D Mark) application tests in order to evaluate the RAM’s XMP profile performance and – in the case of the Talos kit – when it is manually tuned.
Cinebench R20
Maxon released their Cinebench R20 benchmark, more capable of dealing with the heavily threaded processors. Whilst the ‘R23’ version of this program has been released, we have stuck to using R20 (for now) as it is far more widely known amongst the average user and the tech press.
In what is not that much of a surprise, Cinebench really does not benefit at all from faster memory, so the results you see above could be considered within a reasonable margin of error.
7Zip
7-Zip is a multithreading archiver; hence it happens to be very good when checking compression/decompression performance. It is, therefore, a widely used benchmark. We have run decompression and compression tests using a 32Mb dictionary size using 10 passes.
I assumed I was in for results that showed very little difference, and yet the stark jump in compression performance when using the manually tuned Talos kit was… pretty astonishing. This result was regularly repeatable, indicating – to me – that a sub-timing (or the like) is largely responsible for this uptick in performance. I do not have the expertise to explain it, however!
Handbrake
Handbrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, available for macOS X, Linux, and Windows. This software puts multithread CPUs to good use, and it allows us to transcode videos using different codecs. For video transcoding – the more CPU cores, the better, as it’s a processor-intensive task. In this test, we encoded a one-minute 4K source file to 1080p in the MKV container (utilizing the H.265 codec). In the graph below, you’ll find the average number of rendered frames per second.
Handbrake shows little difference. Moving on.
3D Mark Timespy
3D Mark is a well-known software suite that contains a multitude of graphical benchmarks designed to test DX11, DX12, and Ray-Tracing capabilities (in the case of the relatively new ‘Port Royal’ test).
Again, in a surprise to me, when talking about pure CPU score, the tuned Talos kit was able to outmuscle the Apollo kit by c. 400 points. When comparing the XMP profiles of both kits, however, it is a wash.
