How memory speed affects CPU performance

[Idontcare]

In broad terms, we acknowledge that Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770 benefits from using faster memory in more cases than AMD Phenom X4 9850. In other words, QX9770 is more dependent on memory performance. Feel free to choose any definition of these two, depending on whether you want to praise QX9770 or criticize it.

However, these are purely theoretical conclusions, scores and percentages, even their fractions. In practice, it will be very difficult to notice the difference between DDR3-800 and DDR3-1600 even with the fastest quad-core processor from Intel. A couple of games, archivers, some activities in Photoshop and MATLAB -- that's the complete list of situations, where you can try to feel a slightest performance gain. It's up to you to decide whether you want to pay much money for this transient sensation.

http://www.digit-life.com/arti...x9770-ddr3-800-p1.html

There are a tons of applications benched in this article, quite surprising how many they tested actually.

Also, its easy to get lost with their tables. The column labeled "Gain" is the QX9770, next the column labeled "X4 9850". They are comparing the gains for both CPU's with the same applications...no idea why they didn't bother labeling the columns more clearly.