Test System

Pentium 4 2.4c
ABIT IC7-MAX3
ATI Radeon X800 Pro 256 MB
160 GB SATA Seagate Barracuda (8 MB cache)
LiteOn 16X DVD-ROM
Soyo Raptor 400W Power Supply
Windows XP Professional (all the latest updates except Service Pack 2 installed)




ScienceMark 2

ScienceMark2 is a rather interesting utility which uses mathematical calculations to benchmark the CPU and memory. The ScienceMark 2 tests I used were the standard memory benchmark, Cipher, Molecular Dynamics and Primordia tests. ScienceMark 2 times how long it takes to process different scientific equations. The memory bandwidth benchmark is measured in MB/s; the higher the better. The other three tests output the time it took in seconds; lower is better.

ScienceMark 2

Memory Bandwidth

Corsair TWINX PC4000 @ 250 MHz

Crucial Ballistix PC4000 @ 250 MHz

Crucial Ballistix PC4000 @ 255 MHz

4903.48

4903.12

5025.86

0

(MB/s)

8000

 

 

ScienceMark 2
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Cipher

Moldyn

Primordia

Corsair TWINX PC4000 @ 250 MHz

Crucial Ballistix PC4000 @ 250 MHz

Crucial Ballistix PC4000 @ 255 MHz

14.77

14.71

14.43

0

(seconds)

550

 

 

Cipher

Moldyn

Primordia

Corsair TWINX PC4000 @ 250 MHz

Crucial Ballistix PC4000 @ 250 MHz

Crucial Ballistix PC4000 @ 255 MHz

95.76

95.65

93.92

0

(seconds)

550

 

 

Cipher

Moldyn

Primordia

Corsair TWINX PC4000 @ 250 MHz

Crucial Ballistix PC4000 @ 250 MHz

Crucial Ballistix PC4000 @ 255 MHz

447.72

442.94

434.12

0

(seconds)

550

 

 

All of the tests show about a 2% average improvement in performance. This follows along well with the 2% overclock achieved with the Ballistix memory.

Super Pi

Super Pi calculates the infamous number pi from 16 thousand all the way up to 32 million digits! For our testing purposes we decided on two million digits, which takes 20 iterations. Super Pi then spits out the time (in seconds) that it took to do the calculations. Obviously, the lower the number, the better.

Despite the almost identical performance between the Crucial and Corsair memory during ScienceMark 2, the Ballistix takes 1 second longer to finish the 2 million digit pi calculation. Overclocking the Ballistix memory drops the calculation time by 2 seconds.