Test Setup

MSI K8N Neo Platinum: Athlon 64 3200+, 2 x 512MB Corsair TWINX PC3200XL Pro, ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, 120GB Seagate SATA 7200rpm, Windows XP SP1, ATI Catalyst 4.6.

Test software will be:

Unreal Tournament 2003
Quake 3: Arena

All the test numbers we'll be showing off today will be at 200FSB. The comparison ram will be the Corsair TWINX PC4000 ProSeries, tweaked to 2.5-3-3-5, as well as its default 200MHz SPD (3-4-4-7). The TWINX PC3200XL Pro will remain at its default 2-2-2-5 throughout our tests.

SiSoft Sandra 2004 Memory

	Int Buffered iSSE2	Float Buffered iSSE2
TWINX PC3200XL Pro	3088	3088
TWINX PC4000 Pro (2.5-3-3-5)	3057	3055
TWINX PC4000 Pro (3-4-4-7)	3042	3042

Right off the bat, we can see that the tighter timings really do make a difference when it comes to synthetic benchmarks. I should point out that the PC4000 Pro was incapable of matching the PC3200XL Pro's timings, so score one for the XL here.

PiFast

A good indicator of CPU/Motherboard performance is 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.

	Time in Seconds (lower is better)
TWINX PC3200XL Pro	48.09
TWINX PC4000 Pro (2.5-3-3-5)	49.68
TWINX PC4000 Pro (3-4-4-7)	50.13

The trend continues here with the tighter timings making a significant impact in the performance results. The XL is over two seconds faster than the PC4000 Pro @ 200FSB.

CDex Audio Conversion Wav to MP3

CDex was used to convert a 414MB Wav file to a 320kbs MP3.

	Time in Seconds (lower is better)
TWINX PC3200XL Pro	1:32
TWINX PC4000 Pro (2.5-3-3-5)	1:35
TWINX PC4000 Pro (3-4-4-7)	1:38

As with the PiFast benchmark, the XL leads. This time, there is a wider gap in performance, with a difference of three to six seconds in the XL's favour.

TMPGEnc 2.521

We used an Animatrix file, titled , and a WAV created from VirtualDub. The movie was then converted it into a DVD compliant MPEG-2 file with a video bitrate of 5000, and an audio bitrate of 384. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.

	Time in Minutes:Seconds (lower is better)
TWINX PC3200XL Pro	10:33
TWINX PC4000 Pro (2.5-3-3-5)	10:40
TWINX PC4000 Pro (3-4-4-7)	10:48

A huge victory here for the XL, with a 15 second gap between itself and the "default" PC4000 Pro. As with all our real world tests here, the time may seem insignificant, but take into account if you were to use larger files or numbers. We can be talking minutes or hours over time.