GSKill TridentX 2666Mhz CL11 Dual Channel Memory Review

Gigabyte Z77X-UP7 OC - Z77 Chipset
Intel Core i7 3770K (3.5Ghz) Quad Core 4 x 256KB L2 Cache 8MB L3 Cache
Thermaltake Water 2.0 Performer
1x nVidia GTX 580
Western Digital VelociRaptor 150gb SerialATA 10000RPM
LG 20x Super Multi GSA-H55L
Thermaltake Toughpower Grand 1050 Watt PSU
Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit

2x GSKill TridentX PC2666 4GB DDR3 (11-13-13-35)

Reference Memory
2x GSKill RipjawsX PC2133 4GB DDR3 (9-10-9-28)

Sandra is a software collection of synthetic benchmarks that will give us a basic idea as to what a system is capable of. It should be noted that SiSoft numbers change depending on what version you have installed; these were recorded using Sandra Professional Version 18.66.2012.9

AIDA64 Extreme Edition is a streamlined diagnostic and benchmarking software package designed to assist with overclocking and general system tuning.  The package also contains modules to assess the performance of the processor, system memory, and disk drives in addition to normal stuff like stress testing and troubleshooting. 

UT3 is the fourth game in the Unreal Tournament series.  It has no story mode gameplay and is exclusively designed for multiplayer action.  While the gameplay and weapons are similar to the UT2004 counterpart, the gaming engine is all new.  For this benchmark, we're using the UT3Bench tool from Guru3D, and CarbonFire Botmatch to record framerates.  The resolution was set to 1680x1050 since we wanted to access total system performance.

Crysis is based in a fictional future where an ancient alien spacecraft has been discovered beneath the Earth on an island off the coast of China.  Crysis uses DirectX 10 for graphics rendering.  For this benchmark we are using the Crysis Benchmarking Tool to run the Assault Harbor demo at 1680x1050 with global quality set to High.

When you are dealing with high performance memory modules there is very little that separates them in terms of overall performance.  The charts above reflect the performance numbers between two dual channel memory kits and as you can expect the synthetic benchmark numbers reflect what you would expect.  The surprise comes when we look at the real-world gaming numbers and see only a few FPS change between the 2133Mhz and 2666Mhz parts with faster modules posting the better score.