It is believed that memory frequency and timings do not have that much influence over the performance in contemporary systems. So, it only makes sense to invest into high-seed memory modules if the other system components, such as CPU, graphics card and hard drive, are already running at the top of their ability. This reasoning didn’t emerge out of thin air. True, the tests show that improving the memory sub-system settings in Phenom II, Core i7 and Core i5 systems will only provide about 3-7% speed gain, which is a minor improvement.However, these conclusions were first made a while back, so they are primarily true for the previous generation platforms. As for the influence the memory sub-system speed has on the overall performance of contemporary LGA1155 systems, we haven’t yet discussed anything like that. And it obviously makes little sense to translate the old results onto the new Sandy Bridge based platform. Back during our first discussion of this new innovative microarchitecture, we pointed out that the implementation of the memory controller in Sandy Bridge is dramatically different from the way it was implemented in the older Westmere and Nehalem processors. Namely, now the memory controller is located inside a different functional unit than the L3 cache and uses a new ring bus to connect to the computational cores of the processor. All this could have any sort of effect on the memory subsystem contribution to the overall system performance. So, we decided to set up a special test session and find out which memory would be the most optimal choice for LGA1155 processors.