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.'"
Why do these reviews only focus on one thing? (Score:5, Interesting)
"Fast" DDR2 isn't just for overclocking (Score:4, Interesting)
Besides, the price difference between DDR2-533 and DDR2-800 is really small. You might as well go for it, if only for futureproofing your system.
Re:Didn't this happen before? (Score:5, Interesting)
Does it exactly matter if your computer can do 6GB/s, or 12GB/s? 14GB/s? Where does it stop? And even then, that's mostly theorhetical, particularly in the case of DDR2. But a very important distinction is that so many memory accesses are of very small to small size. On basically all of those accesses, the memory request will be served in far less time than the latency will allow the command to return and allow another request.
Way back when, Intel motherboards tried out RDRAM for its 'higher end' boards, and the Nintendo 64 also started using it. Both were fairly large fiascos, in that sense, with more or less all technical reviews noting that the increased latency more than cancelled out the improved bandwidth. Now we're looking at DDR3, with far higher latencies than classic RDRAM for a relatively minor bandwidth improvement that only extremely large memory requests (such as applications that would theorhetically be done in an extremely large-scaled database and scientific research).
It reminds me acutely of the early 'Pentium 4s'. A 600Mhz Pentium 3 could beat up to a 1.7Ghz Pentium 4 in most applications and benchmarks, and the (rare and expensive) 1.4Ghz Pentium 3s were real monsters. But people kept trying to tailor benchmarks to hide that, so people would buy more product.
Overclocking has also generally demonstrated that overclocking regular 'old' DDR1, while a bit pricier (mostly due to the virtual elimination of production nowadays, though), scales better and also has far better numbers than DDR2 and the like. DDR600 equivalent is extraordinarily zippy, and (of course) real-world latency is also absurdly low.
It makes me feel like the 'governing bodies' here have really let people down. Instead of trying to standardize on and promote what's best for general computing, they're trying to push a greater volume of merchandise that has no meaningful improvement, and in fact usually a notable decline, over what we've already had for years. The bottom line for them is money, and that's just wrong to put their own pocketbooks over the long term well-being of computing technology and the needs of the consumer.
Re:4X4 (Score:3, Interesting)
On a dual-processor AMD machine, you have NUMA (non-uniform memory architecture), so each each processor (processor, not core) has its own set of memory and its own bus, meaning you have 2 dual-channel busses.
Re:same old story (Score:3, Interesting)
A given generation of RAM may only make your current system 10% faster, but using the current generation in next years system is likely to stop it reaching anything like its full potential.
Any good transitional mobos? (Score:3, Interesting)
Question (Score:3, Interesting)
Does anyone have any insight?