DDR3 Isn't Worth The Money - Yet 120
An anonymous reader writes "With Intel's motherboard chipsets supporting both DDR2 and DDR3 memory, the question now is whether DDR3 is worth all that extra cash. Trustedreviews has a lengthy article on the topic, and it looks like (for the moment) the answer is no: 'Not to be too gloomy about this, but the bottom line is that it can only be advised to steer clear of DDR3 at present, as in terms of performance, which is what it's all about, it's a waste of money. Even fast DDR2 is, as we have demonstrated clearly, only worthwhile if you are actually overclocking, as it enables you to raise the front-side bus, without your memory causing a bottleneck. DDR3 will of course come into its own as speeds increase still further, enabling even higher front-side bus speeds to be achieved. For now though, DDR2 does its job, just fine.'"
Duh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ad-free! (Score:4, Insightful)
They never learn. Technology marches on. (Score:2, Insightful)
In a year's time, DDR3 will have totally supplanted DDR2.
To every season, turn turn turn (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:"Fast" DDR2 isn't just for overclocking (Score:3, Insightful)
There is no such thing as "futureproofing" a computer. I thought that once too, and spent ridiculous amounts of money on computers that should last very long. They did, but while I could run most future programs well and fast, the people I knew bought a new computer for much cheaper that did the same stuff faster than my futureproofed machine. In the end buying more PCs, for less money. While they had 3 machines over that time, and I only one, they always had the faster machines except for the first 6 months where my machine was so overpowered that it was insane.
Look at the people that bought the first DX10 graphics card in order to run Vista and play DX10 games. Microsoft has already revised the DX10 "standard" and obsoleted these cards.
Futureproofing in computing is not a good idea. Perhaps in servers, yes, but in desktops... No way.
It's The Drives, Stupid (Score:2, Insightful)
Or technically illiterate people (Score:5, Insightful)
So an older guy came and said he wants them to build him a system. He was pretty explicit that he really doesn't want much more than to read emails and send digital photos to his kids. You'd think entry level system, right? Well, the guy behind the counter talked him into buying a system that was vastly more powerful than my gaming rig. (And bear in mind that at the time I was upgrading so often to stay high end, that the guys at the computer hardware store were greeting me happily on the street. Sad, but true.) They sold him the absolute top end Intel CPU, IIRC some two gigabytes of RAM (which at the time was enterprise server class), the absolute top-end NVidia card (apparently you really really need that for graphical stuff, like, say, digital photos), etc.
So basically don't underestimate what lack of knowledge can do. There are a bunch of people who will be just easy prey to the nice man at the store telling them that DDR3 is 50% better than DDR2, 'cause, see 3 is a whole 50% bigger than 2.
And then there'll be a lot who'll make that inferrence on their own, or based on some ads. DDR3 is obviously newer than DDR2, so, hmm, it must be better, right?
Basically at least those teenagers you mention read benchmarks religiously, with the desperation of someone whose penis size depends (physically) on his 3DMark score and how many MHz he's overclocked. If god forbid his score fall 100 points short of the pack leader, he might as well have "IMPOTENT, PLEASE KILL ME" tattooed on the forehead. At 1000 points less, someone will come at a door with a rusty garden scissors and revoke his right to pee standing. So they'll be informed at least roughly what difference does it make, or at least if the guys with the biggest e-penis are on DDR2 or DDR3.
I worry more about moms and pops who don't know their arse from their elbow when it comes to computers. Now _normally_ those won't go for the highest end machine, but I can see them swindled of an extra 100 bucks just because something's newer and might hopefully make their new computer less quick to go obsolete.
Re:Why do these reviews only focus on one thing? (Score:5, Insightful)
With a SCSI 3 card and 4 port Firewire you'd be looking at about 360MB/s of bandwidth assuming that they reach their max theoretical speed (and of course PC hardware always reaches its maximum theoretical speed). Unless they're both on the PCI bus in which case 133MB/s max for both. Which is fairly minor compared to the 6GB/sec of memory bandwidth that I get with shitty DDR2 on a shitty motherboard.
Unless you can provide evidence to the contrary, I am going to go out on a limb and suggest that the performance increases you are expecting do not actually exist. Unless your primary workloads involve running memory benchmarks and Prime95 in which case I would point out that you accidentally posted to Slashdot instead of the Xtremesystems forums.