Performance and Thermals

For performance testing, I put the Ballistix Elite 3600MHz kit through our normal benchmark suite. This includes a few tests using AIDA64, Cinebench, Passmark Performance Test 9, and MaxxMEM. All to get a look at overall performance at the stock speeds. Then after that, I also take a look at the thermals.

So AIDA64 is a very useful tool that allows us to get a look at a few different performance aspects including read, write, and copy speeds as well as memory latency. Testing this kit specifically stands out compared to the past kits tested because all of the other kits have been dual channel kits and this is a quad channel kit and I am testing on X299 which supports quad channel memory. You can see that difference in the read, write, and copy results from ADIA64 below where the Elite kit really pulls ahead of the other kits. The Elite kit stands out in the latency testing as well, with just the Sport LT kit running at 3600 MHz being slightly faster.

I personally prefer tests that show real-world improvements, not just memory specific tests and Cinebench R15 does show how the quad channel bandwidth and low latency can help in CPU performance.

Passmark Performance Test 9 is another synthetic benchmark but this time rather than focusing on each specific result Passmark has aggregated them all together into their Memory Mark score. In this test, the quad channel bandwidth doesn’t make as much of a difference with one of the overclocked Sport LT kits at 3800 MHz being slightly faster.

While testing in AIDA64 I did run their stress test on the memory for a half hour to heat things up and see how the larger heatspreader for the Elite kit would handle things. Below is a thermal image from during that testing. The top of the kit isn’t the hottest spot, there is a little more heat on the sides of the heatspreader around the RAM chips, but you can clearly see where the ram is on the side thermally and it is pulling the heat away from them.