DDR4 vs DDR3 - Apples to Apples Comparison
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2015-05-07
·
1,286 words · ~6 min read
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ddr4 memory it's fast it's power
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efficient it's a requirement if you want to pick up a fancy new CPU that needs it
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and you can learn all about it here so with ddr4
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available why would you want ddr3 anymore on top of all the other stuff
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that i just said ddr4 has four in it that's like one more than
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ddr3 the answer is cost at the time of
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making this video ddr4 is more expensive
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for a given capacity than ddr3 so for
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that reason many potential customers will want to see it justify its higher
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cost so welcome to our apples to apples
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comparison of ddr3 and ddr4
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cooler master v-series semi-modular power supplies feature 80 plus gold
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efficiency and their gold guarantee five year warranty click now to learn more so
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let's introduce our test platform shall we there are no cpus on the market that
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support both ddr3 and ddr4 at least
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consumer ones so we have to be pretty careful to reduce variables and make
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this comparison as fair as possible it
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starts with the processor so we chose two cpus based on the same haswell micro
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architecture from Intel the core i7 4790k
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and the core i7 5820k then we proceeded to disable two of the
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cores on the 5820k and clocked them both
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at straight 4.4 gigahertz with no turbo boost so neither of them would have any
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raw clock speed advantage one thing we couldn't do anything about is the
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difference in cache size but this is as close as we could get to a level playing
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field for the CPU next up is motherboards we've got two Gigabyte
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gaming 5 motherboards the z97x gaming 5
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and the x99 gaming 5. we were looking
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for feature equivalent boards to use for
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both chips and both of these have a very similar loadout with SATA express
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10 gigabit m.2 drive support amplified
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onboard audio qualcomm killer networking
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similar CPU power designs with gigabytes all digital implementation and of course
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a sexy matte black and red color scheme that i find myself caring about probably
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far too much the x99 version does have some extras to go along with its higher
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price a more advanced sound processor three and four-way sli support and some
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led lighting accents including on the heatsink and the i o shield to make it
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easier to plug things in in the dark but enough about that you guys want to know
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about the memory we're using right representing ddr3 at up to the highest
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jdex speed 2133 megahertz with enhanced
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timings we've got a 16 gig dual channel kit of xpg v1 memory resplendent in an
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anodized red finish and representing
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ddr4 at up to the highest jdec ddr4
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speed 2400 megahertz although higher speeds will be coming a 16 gig quad
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channel kit of adata's new ddr4 xpg z1
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series with an updated aggressive looking heat spreader also featuring an
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anodized red finish so huge thanks to adata for providing us with these
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modules for testing even the brand new ddr4 modules operated flawlessly
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throughout the benchmarking process and for that matter so did the motherboards
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i'm really impressed especially with the x99 gaming 5. this one has made a lot of
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progress gigabytes dropping BIOS updates like that and the stability of it is
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much much improved over x99 at launch so
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yeah everything just kind of went smoothly for a change anyway speaking of
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the benchmarking process i guess uh that's what's next so i'm gonna show you
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three different scenarios here first is ddr3 dual channel next is ddr4 dual
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channel so we have a very direct apples to apples comparison between the two
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memory technologies at a variety of speeds and timings and finally to show a
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very best case scenario for modern ddr4
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i threw in a set of results with the RAM overclocked to three gigahertz in quad
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channel mode the configuration that most folks running ddr4 capable processors
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will be running until broadwell comes to the mainstream desktop in dual channel
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only sometime next year now synthetic benchmarks are where ddr4
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should be able to really flex its muscles these ida 64 benches are
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designed to show us the uppermost limits of the theoretical performance of the
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memory subsystem of a pc in our apples to apples test ddr4 delivers better
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performance in reads than ddr3 but actually worse right and latency results
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making this a bit of a wash but in its full quad channel
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configuration our high speed ddr4 is untouchable here next up is real world
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non-gaming results multi-threaded rendering and our 7-zip compression and
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decompression benchmarks are a good way to show off the performance of modern
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cpus with lots of processing cores and high-speed memory is needed to keep all
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of those cores fed so something to note here is that while the performance
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scaling with better memory might not look very impressive the lga 2011 3
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socket is likely to be with us for a few years and has cpus available for it
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already with up to 18 cores so while the
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extra bandwidth even in quad channel isn't needed for this artificial
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quad core that we created here there are ways to kit out a board like this so
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that it's much more likely that that extra memory bandwidth would be used
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which leads to our final set of benchmarks games i only ended up running
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a couple of games the canned benchmark in tomb raider at these settings and my
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custom run at the end of bioshock infinite at these settings because the
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results here don't leave much for me to interpret even going all the way down to
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ddr3 13 33 megahertz so nearly the
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launch speed of ddr3 in dual channel i couldn't create a situation where game
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performance was limited in any meaningful way by the memory subsystem
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on a haswell-based CPU with only four
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cores so in conclusion while it might be
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worthwhile from a platform point of view to invest in ddr4 for your six core or
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eight core processor since you don't really have a choice if you want the
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latest cpus if you're a normal consumer who doesn't really need the extra course
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it looks like lga 1150 with its ancient
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ddr3 memory still has a lot of life left in it and given how unconstrained our
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haswell cpus are even by very low speed
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ddr3 i think it's safe to say that the performance improvements we can expect
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to see from Intel's upcoming broadwell desktop processors will be thanks to
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architectural improvements not the use of ddr4
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guys like this video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a
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comment letting me know what you thought were you expecting ddr4 in an apples to
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apples comparison to run away with it or were you expecting exactly the results
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you saw today check out the link in the video description if you want to support
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