DDR2 & DDR3 Memory Roundup: Corsair, Patriot, GeIL, Elixir

Page 3 - Performance: PCMark Vantage

PCMark is one of the most popular benchmark tests for "general" PC performance evaluation. Created by the famous Futuremark, creators of the 3DMark series, PCMark Vantage is intended to be a complete testing solution for all system components, and for it to be effective it loads components not with specific tasks that are unlikely to occur but with ones that are more... common. Tests in the PCMark Vantage pack measure how well does your computer performs in 3D games, working with documents (Office pack like), Internet browsing (in a browser with lots of tabs), image processing, HD video, video rendering, PIP (picture in picture), and many others. We get the summary result in the form of points... which is hardly intuitive data for anyone that haven't ran PCMark Vantage on his/hers own PC in order to find out how fast our systems are. But, hey, what are going to do... that's that. So lets see how do our 9 system and memory combos are performing.

The test is influenced mostly by the processor speed, but we do noticed few other things too. First of all - PCMark Vantage apparently uses relatively little system memory and in 3x1GB against 3x2GB the difference in performance is affected by the speed of the memory itself, not the volume. While in 2x2 GB against 2x1GB, the 4GB system has a slight advantage. Aaanyway... Points given by PCMark remain nothing but points, it being a synthetic test its results are of little use.