DC Opteron 2.5GHz RAM speed effect

[swaaye]

With all the hype surrounding DDR2 and Socket M2 I have been wondering how much a dual core K8 likes bandwidth/latency. I've been encoding a lot of video lately with Staxrip/Divx6.1.1, so I went about encoding three times on the same job with different RAM settings.

Job 1: 2.5GHz, 250MHz RAM, 3-4-3-8 (PC4000 2GB DDR1)
1st pass=79 fps, 2nd pass=81 fps

Job 2: 2.5GHz, 195MHz RAM, 3-4-3-8
1st pass=74 fps , 2nd pass=76 fps

Job 3: 2.5GHz, 195MHz RAM, 2.5-3-2-8
1st pass= 77fps, 2nd pass= 77fps

All passes run with a minimum of background apps running. Identical OS environments. There's definitely a combination of benefit between lower latency and more bandwidth. The higher latency of the RAM is less damaging with a high RAM clock. The delta here though isn't exactly mind-blowing.

 

[mczak]

With all the hype surrounding DDR2 and Socket M2 I have been wondering how much a dual core K8 likes bandwidth/latency. I've been encoding a lot of video lately with Staxrip/Divx6.1.1, so I went about encoding three times on the same job with different RAM settings.
...
The delta here though isn't exactly mind-blowing.

If you want to see larger ones, you could try single channel... With single cores, the difference single/dual channel wasn't that large (maybe 10% or so) usually, I'd suspect it should be quite a bit more with dual cores in some benchmarks (like this one).