To be perfectly frank Duncan, I've been bummed about the situation for
years now because every time they come out with a new memory standard
the hype machine goes into high gear and we are made to believe a load
of bat guano. DDR3 as it now stands is faintly superior to DDR2 just as
DDR2 is mildly superior to DDR. IMHO, it would be more appropriate to
compare DDR to DDR3 (if the chipset/mobo dual standard existed) and even
then I suspect the difference would be minor.
The only memory hardware reviews that I've read where one memory
standard is substantially superior to another is to compare 256 bit wide
GDDR3 to 128 bit wide GDDR5. Both have the same bandwidth and yet the
GDDR5 has half the interface which of course is cheaper to implement
hence the new Radeon 4770's great bang for the buck.
Nothing personal to anyone but I want to cut through the hype because it
irks me that the manufacturers think people are stupid. The benchmarks
don't lie and we are not stupid!
DHSinclair wrote:
Stan,
I always love your replies. I may often NOT comprehend them, and,
reply badly, but I do read them and continue to think about the subject.
I never meant to start a "skirmish" over RAM.
Yes, I did buy/own DDR3 RAM for my 3 P5Q3 m/b's. As I read the notes,
it was a required upgrade. OK. I am an early adopter. So far, so good.
I have no complaints yet about my "not much more expensive that DDR2"
RAM.
Here, it is all good ATM. But then, I do NOT exercise my RAM to the
limits I think both you and James are sharing.
I am mostly pedestrian in the RAM-speed department now.
Best,
Duncan
Stan Zaske wrote:
I understand that i7 has no DDR2 option as that has been widely
reported for many months. I thought that I was pretty clear in saying
there is little to no performance difference in going from one memory
standard to the next and therefore if you choose to buy into any
other mainstream (non-i7) platform there is no practical reason to
buy DDR3 over DDR2 until there is no other choice.
i7 of course is a fine platform and the fastest there is currently
(as everyone agrees) but thats not because of DDR3 thats because of
the i7's architecture. In fact, there have been several reviews
comparing i7 dual channel vs. triple channel and there isn't any
difference again even though the synthetic benches say there is.
DDR3 is currently too slow and has too high a latency to demonstrate
a clear performance advantage over DDR2 and it was the same exact
situation during the transition from DDR to DDR2 several years ago as
I'm sure you must remember. It was severely hyped and when the
benchmarking began it was a huge disappointment to hardware
enthusiasts hoping for something great. I know I was disappointed
after all the BS.
James Boswell wrote:
Well, the issue there is that I can't benchmark an i7 with DDR2
and as I've said already, due to the FSB bottleneck, it really is
completely useless on a Core 2
On 2 Jun 2009, at 01:30, Stan Zaske wrote:
Can you get me a link to a good hardware review that show these
real world performance improvements that you're talking about? As I
said, I've been reading hardware reviews for many years on this
subject and see no hard evidence to back what you're saying.
Synthetic benchmarks always show an improvement in bandwidth but
when you use practical software applications and do comparisons
there is minimal if any difference in speed. Certainly nothing that
a human beings perception could detect.
James Boswell wrote:
On 2 Jun 2009, at 01:00, Stan Zaske wrote:
SDRAM--->DDR--->DDR2--->DDR3=more bandwidth, more latency, lower
voltage and lower heat. After a decade and dozens if not hundreds
of hardware reviews that show minimal to no real world
performance improvements (synthetic? Uh huh!) DDR3 is another
solution to a problem that doesn't exist. Only when speeds get
well above DDR3 2500 will there be significant and noticeable
speed improvement.
DDR3-1600 is a very significant improvement over DDR2-800... the
issue is that Core 2's are hooked up to memory controllers the
other side of the an FSB, the IMC in the i7 delivers... heroic
bandwidth from DDR3
The problem does exist, but the memory always always ALWAYS comes
before its needed, in this case it came in the middle of the Core
2 generation, when it wasn't needed or useful until i7
One exception to this is DDR memory coming with the Athlon (huge
performance kick)
-JB
