Testing

Our test setup is made up of an Intel Core i7 965 Extreme Edition, installed on the MSI X58 Eclipse. A single 8800GTX is taking care of video duties and a Seagate 7200.11 1TB hard drive for storage. The latest drivers for all hardware was used at the time of testing (February 27, 2009).

We will be comparing performance against the Kingston HyperX 1600MHz 3GB kit. As we did not have a 6GB Kingston kit available, for the Corsair Dominator, we will be testing on both 32-Bit and 64-Bit Vista. For those of you unaware, 3GB is the maximum memory that will be addressed by Windows 32-Bit. The Windows memory manager is limited to a 4 GB physical address space. As your video card will occupy some of the space, as well as the BIOS, whatever space left over is what is available for the memory. 64-Bit Windows does not have this limitation. Thus, the Corsair Dominator will be artificially operating at 3GB in the 32-Bit environment. With the Kingston kit in 64-Bit, we'll get an idea of the gap moving from 3GB to 6GB. For both memory kits, both were configured with Intel’s Extreme Memory Profiles.

On the software front:

OS: Windows Vista Ultimate 32-Bit and 64-Bit, fully patched with SP1.

Synthetic Testing: Lavalys Everest Ultimate Edition and SisoftSandra 2009

Real-World: PiFast, DVDShrink and TMPGEnc

Gaming: Enemy Territory:Quake Wars, Far Cry 2

SiSoft Sandra 2009 Memory Integer

SiSoft Sandra 2009 Memory Floating-Point

Everest Photoworx

While there isn't a whole lot of hard data when using synthetic benchmarks, we can get an idea of trending and what sort of performance we can probably expect. The Kingston memory's performance is even across both versions of Windows, while the Corsair Dominator jumps up significantly when using all 6GB of the kit.

DVD Shrink

We ripped the War of the Worlds bonus feature off the disk at 100% and compressed the file from the hard drive to 70%. Times are in seconds, and lower is better. Performance was close but between 3GB to 6GB, there wasn't much difference for Corsair. Either way, it holds a lead over Kingston.

PiFast

A good indicator of CPU/Motherboard performance is PiFast version 4.2, by Xavier Gourdon. We used a computation of 10000000 digits of Pi, Chudnovsky method, 1024 K FFT, and no disk memory. Note that lower scores are better, and times are in seconds. Corsair's performance is significantly better than Kingston here.