G.Skill Ripjaws 4 DDR4-3000 Memory Review

TECHNOLOGY X TESTING PROTOCOL

At Technology X, we test our RAM using certain benchmarks. The benchmarks chosen are more synthetic but you can still get an idea on the RAM’s performance. One thing to note is that our system has been optimized with our SSD Optimization Guide giving our system a nice boost in performance. UEFI settings such as all C-states have been disabled as well as EIST (Enhanced Intel SpeedStep Technology) for this testing. The CPU used is this review is an Intel Core I7-5960X in which our review on the CPU can be found HERE.

TECHNOLOGY X TEST SETUP

As seen the components are laid out on a table, this is our preference as we use this set up currently on LN2 benching as well. All components used are retail samples and can be purchased at most IT stores as well as online stores.

BENCHMARK SOFTWARE

To test our RAM we will use a variety of benchmarks such as SuperPI 32M, AIDA64, WinRAR, Cinebench R15 and Firestrike Extreme Physics test. Although most are synthetic benchmarks, you will still see the difference in performance wise at different speeds and latencies.

OVERCLOCKING AND LATENCY TUNING

First off, we will get a baseline by running AIDA64’s ‘Cache and Memory Benchmark’ with the RAM set to its stock settings of 3000MHz CL15-15-15-35 1.35V.

From here, we will tune our RAM to try to gain better performance. With some tuning, we were able to get our RAM timings down to CL13-14-14-25 1T @ 3000MHz with 1.45V. By underclocking we were able to obtain 2800MHz CL13-13-13-25 1T 1.35V. From there we tried 3200MHz CL15-15-15-35 1T which, as you can see, are the stock timings of the RAM @ stock clock of 3000MHz which took 1.45V as well.  We did not want to go over 1.45V as this is around the maximum we recommend for daily use.

This table shows the settings used for the following benchmarks.