modification of the memory controller that happened during the launch of the new processors on Sandy Bridge microarchitecture deserves our most positive feedback. Intel engineers not only managed to fix the issues in the memory controller of the previous generation Westmere processors, but also to create a new controller, which turned out the highest performing of all existing modifications. Due to elimination of all major bottlenecks between the computational cores and the memory controller, Sandy Bridge proved to be more dependent on the specifications of the DDR3 SDRAM modules in the system than the predecessors or competitors.
However, it doesn’t change the situation in a larger scale. Every time when we discussed the effects of memory speed on the overall performance in certain configurations, we arrived at the conclusion that these effects were quite insignificant. This conclusion that we made back in the days for Socket AM3 and LGA1156 systems proved true one more time. It is also valid for Sandy Bridge based platforms and is backed up by the test results. The results show that the 266 MHz increase in the memory frequency produces only 2-4% growth in the average performance. And by setting all latencies one step lower we can only boost the performance by 1-2% at best.
We believe that inexpensive DDR3-1600 SDRAM with not very aggressive timings would be the most reasonable choice for contemporary LGA1155 systems: in our opinion, memory like that offers the best price-to-performance ratio today.