GIMP Image Editing

Website: GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP)



Overall there's quite a notable increase in real world performance from the basic 1,600MHz CL9 to 2,000MHz CL7 of nine seconds, but that only equates to just three per cent. 1,600MHz CL6 is also faster than 2,000MHz CL7 too, however it's not until CL7 that we see a significant performance drop, with CL8 virtually the same as CL9. The same goes for 2,000MHz as a whole - there's only a three second gap between all timing settings. The 1,800MHz and 2,160MHz are even worse, showing almost no trend whatsoever and actually got consistently slower the faster we pushed.

For those who spend a lot of time image editing, we'd absolutely push users to buying more memory, rather than faster memory.

Handbrake H.264 Encoding

Website: HandBrake

Our test uses HandBrake - an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows - to encode a high resolution MPEG-2 video using the H.264 codec. This primarily tests multi-threaded CPU and memory subsystem performance.



Memory performance makes absolutely NO difference to x.264 video encoding. You might as well buy the cheapest sticks you can get away with and plow more money into a CPU with more cores/threads and CPU cooling to crank its frequency.