But let’s go over from synthetic tests to real applications.

SYSmark2002 measures system performance in basic office and content-creation applications. The results indicate that in some cases DDR400 SDRAM together with 400MHz bus doesn’t provide any advantage over the 333MHz bus. Office applications were most fastidious to memory timings, while streaming-data applications put more emphasis on the communication speed between the CPU and the memory.

The DDR400 system with “bad” timings is once again no better than the DDR333 system at archiving data with WinRAR utility. Even most aggressive timings of DDR400 SDRAM give us only a 3% gain over the 333MHz bus and DDR333 SDRAM system. Meanwhile, the transition from the 266MHz to 333MHz bus made the system about 13% faster.

Video-stream processing proved to be more dependent on the data transfer rate between the CPU and the memory. DDR400 with any timings is better than DDR333 here.

The final rendering in 3ds max 5 is performed faster on the 400MHz bus and the speed doesn’t practically depend on memory subsystem settings.