A couple of weeks ago I ordered 32gb RAM from Crucial for my incoming iMac (which came today. YAY!). After I ordered, I read a few recent threads here and found out about RAM from Kingston with a faster CL - CL9 vs. Crucial's CL11.
Yes, I know the differences are trivial, but doing some google searches didn't produce any memory benchmarks comparing the two. So, owing to my anal retentiveness... and the fact that my iMac is top line (27", 3.4 i7, 6800 GPU, 768gb SSD), I wasn't about to settle for "slower" memory.
So I ordered the Kingston from Amazon, knowing I could return either if need be. All were here when FedEx delivered my iMac today.
Out of the box, I installed the Crucial (CL11) RAM and did the iMac startup. Before doing anything else (no migrating), I downloaded Geekbench 2.0, entered my license number and started testing - first with the Crucial RAM, then turned off the iMac and swapped in the Kingston (CL9) RAM.
Methodology: I used the Geekbench's 64 bit benchmarks, ran the tests five times each for both RAMS. Here are the final, averaged scores:
Crucial (CL11):
Memory Performance: 7711
Stream Performance: 8822
Kingston (CL9):
Memory Performance: 7788
Stream Performance: 9056
Thus, the CL9 ram was 1% faster memory performance, and 2.6% faster stream performance.
I should point out that the CL9 was consistently faster than CL11 on all five passes.
There you have it. Not much difference, and probably nothing anybody would ever notice.
Is it worth the extra ~$20 for the faster RAM? Performance wise, probably not. Peace of mind - maybe.
I think I'll be keeping the Kingston.
ETA:
For comparison reference, I did the same test on my old, mid 2010 iMac w/2.93 i7 and 16gb DDR1300 RAM:
Memory Performance: 4977
Stream Performance: 5407
Yes, I know the differences are trivial, but doing some google searches didn't produce any memory benchmarks comparing the two. So, owing to my anal retentiveness... and the fact that my iMac is top line (27", 3.4 i7, 6800 GPU, 768gb SSD), I wasn't about to settle for "slower" memory.
So I ordered the Kingston from Amazon, knowing I could return either if need be. All were here when FedEx delivered my iMac today.
Out of the box, I installed the Crucial (CL11) RAM and did the iMac startup. Before doing anything else (no migrating), I downloaded Geekbench 2.0, entered my license number and started testing - first with the Crucial RAM, then turned off the iMac and swapped in the Kingston (CL9) RAM.
Methodology: I used the Geekbench's 64 bit benchmarks, ran the tests five times each for both RAMS. Here are the final, averaged scores:
Crucial (CL11):
Memory Performance: 7711
Stream Performance: 8822
Kingston (CL9):
Memory Performance: 7788
Stream Performance: 9056
Thus, the CL9 ram was 1% faster memory performance, and 2.6% faster stream performance.
I should point out that the CL9 was consistently faster than CL11 on all five passes.
There you have it. Not much difference, and probably nothing anybody would ever notice.
Is it worth the extra ~$20 for the faster RAM? Performance wise, probably not. Peace of mind - maybe.
I think I'll be keeping the Kingston.
ETA:
For comparison reference, I did the same test on my old, mid 2010 iMac w/2.93 i7 and 16gb DDR1300 RAM:
Memory Performance: 4977
Stream Performance: 5407
