Memory Performance: 16GB DDR3-1333 to DDR3-2400 on Ivy Bridge IGP with G.Skill

Memory reviews are, in my opinion, actually quite hard to do.  There are plenty of memory kits available that are nice and cheap, and the easy way to differentiate between them in a review is usually though synthetics – without too much effort we can find memory comparison articles online that deal solely in synthetics.  The downside of synthetics is that they rarely emulate real-world performance.  When the requests came in for a comparison of memory kits available on the market, I was stumped to find real-world examples where memory truly matters by significant margins, and benchmarks to match.  Fast forward a month or so, and we have compiled a series of tests taking advantage of some of the most memory limited examples common to most users – IGP performance using memory from DDR3-1333 to DDR3-2400.  Inside this review we have also mixed in some encoding, compression, and you may be surprised to hear that USB 3.0 performance is also affected by memory speed.  In this article we also look at and review the memory kits that G.Skill has gracefully provided from their Ares, Sniper, RipjawsX, RipjawsZ and TridentX brands.