Hardware

Game Performance Testing:

The next benchmarking section goes straight to the gaming arena, and we've selected a suite of four game tests: Unreal Tournament 3, Company of Heroes, World in Conflict, Crysis, and ET: Quake Wars. These may or may not be affected by the higher memory speed, as games tend to be more GPU-limited than anything else, but keep an eye out for even slight differences.

Unreal Tournament 3 Performance

The overall Unreal Tournament 3 benchmark scores followed a set range, with the difference between highest and lowest being only a bit more than 5 fps. We don't expect a monumental change with DDR2-1066, but we are happy to see any performance increase.

Company of Heroes Performance

Company of Heroes is another demanding game benchmark that may show some level of memory dependence. It does, but like Unreal Tournament 3, there is only a small difference - 10 fps from top to bottom.

World in Conflict Performance

World in Conflict gives us another type of game test, this time with serious overhead even at 1024x768. The overall framerates are much lower, but even so, we do see slightly higher scores for dual-channel DDR2-1066 than DDR2-667.

ET: Quake Wars Performance

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is another demanding benchmark, falling somewhere between the two extremes. Framerates range from 156 to 163 fps, so there is not a significant gap, but still enough to show that faster memory does play a part in gaming performance.