Corsair Twinx4000 DDR500 Dual Channel Memory Review

2x Corsair XMS4000 DDR500 1024megs
2x Crucial Ballistix Tracer DDR500 512megs

Sandra is a software collection of synthetic benchmarks that will give us a basic idea as to what a system is capable of. It should be noted that SiSoft numbers change depending on what version you have installed, these were recorded using Sandra Professional Version 2004.10.9.133

Cachemem is a synthetic benchmark used to test bandwidth and latency.

The best of the best when it comes to real world benchmarks, this free program is available from eTesting Labs and uses real programs to test the overall performance of your computer. These programs include: Adobe Photoshop 7.0.1, Adobe Premiere 6.50, Macromedia Director MX 9.0, Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 6.1, Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 9 Version 9.00.00.2980, NewTek's LightWave 3D 7.5b, and Steinberg WaveLab 4.0f.

Due to the better timings the Crucial modules won both of the synthetic tests but came up short when it came to real world content creation. Three Winstone points might not sound like much so to put things into perspective One point typically equals 200Mhz in processor speed if everything else remains the same. In this case the only change was total memory thus translating into a almost "Free" performance enhancement.

Gaming benchmarks were purposefully left out of this review for a couple reasons. 1) Modern gaming performance depends largely on your video and processor speed; as once the game has loaded the system rarely needs to access any cached data from the hard drive. 2) Games are applications just like Photoshop or Word; the only difference is instead of drawing blood on your power point presentation you make it using mid-air cross map rail shots to the head. It is just easier to illustrate using content creation applications than something that runs in a constant loop.

Next enhanced bandwidth benchmarks.