Gaming
Everyone knows that performance in today's games is largely bound by a system's graphics processor. Or at least everyone should know that. But time and time again, I see fanboys and forum dwellers espousing the benefits of fancy-pants memory modules. To find out if faster memory makes games run better on the Core i7, we've run a couple of sets of gaming tests. For the first set, we've stuck to a relatively modest resolution of 1024x768 with high in-game detail levels. This should be child's play for our duo of GeForce GTX 280 1GB graphics cards in SLI.

The performance impact of memory speed varies from one game to the next, but faster memory clearly makes a difference, particularly in Far Cry 2. Most of these games produce frame rates well into the hundreds here, so it's really only with Far Cry 2 and Crysis that we're dealing with differences in performance that you might be able to actually see when playing. Both games show steady (if modest) frame rate increases with faster memory configurations. The only odd exception is our dual-channel DDR3-1066 config, which is quicker than expected in Far Cry 2.