TeamGroup T-FORCE Dark Z DDR4 3600 MHz memory review

Dark Z Performance Testing

Test System

Our testing methods are always the same, no matter what the review. The room is kept as close to 20°c as possible. The 9700k used in this review was left at stock Intel speeds. The BIOS for the motherboard was updated if needed. Most benchmarks were run three times and averaged to get the result.

For overclocking, I wanted to limit factors outside the memory kit for performance gains. I left the CPU and GPU at their stock factory shipped configurations. Overclocking the DARK Z left a lot to be desired actually. I was only able to bump the speeds up by 133 MHz for a total overclock of 3733 MHz. It didn’t matter what voltage or timings I set, 3733 is where it was at. With that, 3733 MHz was completely stable and didn’t present any issues.

IDA64 ENGINEER

AIDA64 implements a set of 64-bit benchmarks to measure how fast the computer performs various data processing tasks and mathematical calculations. Multi-threaded memory and cache benchmarks are available to analyze system RAM bandwidth and latency. Benchmark pages of AIDA64 Extreme provide several methods to measure system performance. These benchmarks are synthetic, so their results show only the theoretical maximum performance of the system. The AIDA64 suite has various benchmarks for CPU, FPU, GPU, storage and memory testing.

In Aida’s memory bandwidth test the Dark Z scores 50576 MB/s in the write tests, 4779 MB/s in the read tests, and 44015 in the copy tests. The Dark Z modules lag behind the Corsair and G.Skill modules. The Dominator modules scored 51905 MB/s in the write tests, 50452 MB/s read, and 54847 in the copy tests. G.Skill modules score 52445 MB/s read, 51240 MB/s write, 46036 MB/s copy test.

7-Zip

The 7-zip benchmark shows a rating of MIPS (million instructions per second). The rating value is calculated from the measured speed, and it is normalized with the results of the Intel Core 2 CPU with a multi-threading option switched off. So, if you have modern CPU from Intel or AMD, rating values in single-thread mode must be close to real CPU frequency. There are two tests, compression with the LZMA method and decompression with the LZMA method. Once the total passes reach 100, the score is taken.

In 7-ZIP, the DARK Z scores a total rating of 51071 vs, 56419 from the Dominator, and 57334 from G.Skill modules. Decompressing scores come in at 51308 for the Dark Z, 62858 for the Platinum RGB, and 66205 for the Trident Z royals. The compressing tests show 40834 for the Dark Z, 49981 for the Platinum RGB, and 48463 for the Trident Z Royals.

SiSoft Sandra Lite

Sandra Lite is a free version of SiSoft’s Sandra testing suite. Sandra Lite is a synthetic benchmark program that has its own set of system memory specific benchmarks. Aggregated scores of the Memory bandwidth performance in Gigabytes per second and Memory Transaction Throughput in total throughput per second are measured (higher is better).

ASUS ROG Realbench

ROG Realbench is an open-source program, designed to test your PC as it would run in real-world scenarios. It’s a semi-synthetic testing suite that collects four different programs and can perform controlled runs of each related to image editing (GIMP), video encoding (Handbrake H.264), OpenCL (Luxmark) and Heavy Multitasking (Combination of all three at the same time). Specifically, the test I ran was the image editing benchmark to gauge memory performance.

3DMARK Time Spy

3DMark is a computer benchmarking tool created and developed by Futuremark used to determine the performance of a computer’s 3D graphics rendering and CPU workload processing capabilities. It does this through a series of graphics and physics and or CPU tests.