How to benchmark RAM memory with a Linux Distro?

Consider that in today's machines one real memory access is worth a few hundred instructions, the benchmark results probably depend much more on CPU and cache behaviour than RAM speed. And the speed might be limited by the motherboard's handling of RAM too.

The package hardinfo (http://sourceforge.net/projects/hardinfo.berlios/) is a pretty decent system benchmarker with a nice GUI. The simplest way to compare the two would be to benchmark one save the results and then compare it to your benchmarking of the other.

EDIT

Depending on your distro, you may already have hardinfo installed, for example on Lubuntu it is called "System Profiler and Benchmark".