Development started on V6 of MemTest86 (with DDR4 support)

[David (PassMark)]

We started development work on MemTest86 V6.0 a while back.

The major features at the moment are,

• DDR4 support. This is a big deal for a memory testing product as there are a lot of changes and testing to be done. It has been about 7 years since the introduction of DDR3.
• X99 motherboard support and Haswell-E CPU suuport, that come along at the same time as DDR4
• Much improved RAM benchmarking including graphing & saving of results to disk & comparing your results to other machines.
• 'Row hammer' testing. We have seen reports that upto 70% of all RAM fails in this type of testing.

So if there is anything that you think needs to be included into the next major release of MemTest86, just let us know.

Also, if you have any X99 / DDR4 test hardware available before the official release from Intel (likely in Sept 2014) please let us know.

[David (PassMark)]

Here is a screen shot showing an early version of the benchmark graphing functions in MemTest86 V6.

The first graph shows the memory speed in MBytes/Sec for various step sizes. The step size refers to if the memory addresses accessed are continuous, or if there are gap in the address (e.g. 32bits are read each from 128 bytes, with the other 124 bytes skipped over). As you can see from the graphs, the most RAM is much quicker when doing sequential access.



This next graph shows the memory speed in MBytes/Sec for various block sizes. Small blocks of RAM can fit entirely in the CPUs cache so access is much quicker. As the blocks get larger the cache becomes ineffective and the speed drops. It can also be seen that reading 64bits at a time is much much faster than reading 8bits at a time.



Both the graphs above were from a Intel Core i7-2600 @ 3.40GHz with PC3-10700, 667 MHz RAM. (But running in a VM, to allow clean screen shots to be taken).

[David (PassMark)]

Here is a preliminary screen shot showing MemTest86 V6 decoding the RAM SPD data from Hynix's new DDR4 RAM. PC4-17000 (DDR4-2132). CPU used was a Xeon Engineering sample which we can't name.