Dynamic RAM depends on being accessed every few milliseconds in order to maintain its contents - refresh cycles - and has no standby mode. Power consumption doesn't vary significantly however hard the processor drives it.
There's a significant difference between a refresh RAS cycle every few microseconds and constantly hammering the ras/cas clocks at full speed. While Prime95 only uses a few megabytes, it hammers those few megabytes constantly which causes a LOT of memory cycles. each RAS cycle causes an entire row of each chip to be internally cycled, with PC3200/DDR400, clocked at 200Mhz, I believe this can occur as frequently as 40Mhz (5 clock minimum RAS cycle.. It might be more like 20Mhz, I'm too lazy to dig up a DDR SDRAM timing diagram and figure out a single random access timing at the moment)
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