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DDR3 Isn't Worth The Money - Yet
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.'"
I read Intel supports Dance Dance Revolution 3.
I would have to agree. I see all these kids pumping quarters into these machines and pretending to dance. Seems like a complete waste of money to me.
Who in their right mind would pay so much for RAM? The only people I can think of are the middle - upper class teenagers with lots of money. The ones who run 8800Ultra's in SLI thinking that 2 cards = twice the performance when it's more like 30 - 50 % increase. Most educated system builders wont spend more money then they have to, and DDR 3 is just overpriced.
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I'm so used to crap like c|net that I immediately went searching for a "printer-friendly" (aka, ad-free) version of the article, but lo and behold, that's not necessary. To think, I could actually read an article online without having to navigate through the usual nightmare... what an intriguing concept!
Yawn.
Well then, we have to wait for AM2+ to become available, and with the new AM2+ Barcelonas, it will worth the money.
Reminds me RDRAM...
Could someone enlighten me the power consumption of these RAM nowadays? Do we need something interruptive now?
Every time I see "the need isn't there" or "there's more than enough memory bandwidth" I check their figures, they're only measuring the CPU memory needs. Well, hate to break it to you, but there's more to a computer than just the CPU. Having that extra bandwidth means that those lovely PCI Bus Mastering devices (such as my SCSI 3 controller, and quad firewire card) aren't fighting with the CPU for memory access. Frankly, add in a game accelerator like the Phys-X and a high-end GPU fetching data from the main memory for local cache, and even DDR3 starts looking a bit narrow....
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
60ns SIMMs ought to be fast enough for anybody.
In a year's time, DDR3 will have totally supplanted DDR2.
Anyone remember when DDR2 was rolled out and was actually *slower* than the standard of the day, regular DDR? It took about a year IIR for the speed of the newer ramm to catch up and overtake the older ram, and even then it was still pricey. I expect with the current glut in the market of DDR2 that it will take quite a while for DDR3 to be considered a worthy upgrade.
There is simply too much glass..
That's just because it hasn't gotten out for Wii just yet.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
...isn't worth it when it's brand new. Give it a while for the price to come down.
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
You obviously haven't been around lately. There is a lot of love for Intel Core stuff. Intel has open source drivers for a lot of their hardware too. So there really is no Intel hate.
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...news?
Seriously, I don't want the sky to fall or anything, but sometimes no news is better than "it was obvious" news.
Intel's C2Ds love their memory bandwidth. Even the extreme low end, such as the E4xxx, can profit from something like DDR2-800 and an asynchronous 1:2 FSB:RAM. The E6xxx with their 266 MHz FSB can run at 2:3 with DDR2-800 and perform better than with 1:1 and slightly lower latencies.
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.
I remember the same discussion when DDR2 was hitting stores.
More Twoson than Cupertino
Really, memory and CPU bottlenecks are not the biggest issue right now. The problem is and has been storage speed. It doesn't matter if we can crunch bits faster on the mainboard if we can't get them in and out to begin with. Memory and CPU speeds are skyrocketing and hard disk performance has stayed rather flat for years. Until drive performance catches up we'll still be waiting forever for the OS to boot up or apps to load.
The "article" if it can be called that is split up into 14 separate pages. Why? To serve you more ads as you attempt to read through it of course.
Nearly every incremental step in technology is met with a barrage of "it's too expensive, it doesn't work right, it's not worth it, nobody will go there..." at which point it goes on to become the norm.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
Or does anyone else have trouble taking a site called "TrustedReviews" seriously?
TODO: Something witty here...
Would DDR3 be worthwhile in a system with two quad-processors installed? I'm sure that'd load down the bus pretty heavily...
Is it just me or does it seem like every new memory technology disappoints? I've built systems since before EDO-DRAM was all the rage, and we've seen lots of advances since... Burst EDO, SDRAM, RDRAM, DDR, DDR2, DDR3... but every time one of these supposed breakthroughs debuts, the review sites quickly go to work and reveal (at most) 5-10% performance increases over the previous generation. Often it's in the 1-2% benefit range. It seems like its very difficult to squeeze extra performance out of memory without changing everything around the memory as well... bus speeds, chipsets, processor speeds, timings, etc. This will likely take a while before DDR3 actually becomes benficial.
I know this is offtopic, but what the heck is going on with people's use of commas these days. I've even been finding myself using them unnecessarily more recently, just because I've been reading so damn many more of them these days than I used to.
I still haven't mastered Dance Dance Revolution 2.
This, is a, great article, and I will, read, it again and, again.
I'm looking for a motherboard that has DDR2 and DDR3 slots, but also a firewire port (and eSATA would be a plus), necessary for video editing. Any takers? I could only find one by Gigabyte on newegg but the reviews are mixed.
I haven't even mastered Dance Dance Revolution #1 yet. There's already a 3?
Actually, I was trying to be Insightful, not Funny.
Some, oh, I think 6-7 years ago, I happened to be at the local computer store, to buy some stuff. (In the meantime I buy most components online, so that's not to say it hasn't happened ever since, just that I wasn't there to see it.)
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.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Yep, there's just poor product hate.
which is totally what she said
The real question I have is whether or not DDR2 is worth upgrading over DDR1. I have 2 gigabytes of DDR RAM in my computer, and I recently started thinking that upgrading might be a good idea. But would I notice a performance increase by upgrading to DDR2? I don't want to spend $150 on a new motherboard and RAM only to get a marginal speed boost.
Does anyone have any insight?
So does ATI / AMD and they have real video cards with there own ram.
before we move to DDR3?
I appreciate some users make heavy use of graphics software and/or games etc, but for regular office use I am willing to bet that 90% of people have an absolute overkill of a system. I'm using a 1.6 ghz Pentium 4 with 640 MB of ram ( oblig: it should be enough for everybody ; ) , and currently about 258 of that is used ( when accounting for buffers and cache ) to run my desktop environment and most of the software I ever use. Essentially, I expect that in perhaps 2-3 years time I might actually consider to upgrade it along with the screen, and then I will probably just find someone about to replace their "old" core 2 duo. So in summary I want to praise Xfce for saving me a decent bunch of cash in terms of lower hardware requirements. It may not have the smallest footprint there is, but it is impressive what it manages to do with the low amount of resources it does use.
You keep telling that to yourself.
I want my Half-Life 2 levels to load faster.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
As default luser said, the difference would be marginal. I probably wouldn't bother upgrading your RAM unless you were also upgrading your CPU to a Core 2 Duo (which doesn't have any motherboards that use regular DDR, IIRC). Here's a benchmark. I have a E6600 which is stable and quiet when overclocked to 3.474 GHz with a Scythe Infinity...and 31 degrees C.
2-2-2-5 DDR is still plenty for this guy who only plays IL2 1946
I hate these freaking articles that tell ME, a hard-working, well-paid computer consumer that something is "too expensive". That is a relative term, and relative to most everyone else's income, maybe it ISN'T too expensive for me. A product is worth what somebody will pay for it, everyone else who isn't buying it can STFU and butt out. Just because YOU can't afford it, doesn't mean it is "too expensive" (whatever that means).
That's because you're not playing it on double. Once you have 8 panels over a 66-inch-wide platform, Dance Dance Revolution begins to look a lot more like dancing.
ObTopic: For people in the USA, DDR 3rd Mix isn't worth the money to import a Japanese PS1 and a Japanese game. Stick with Konamix.
Take two machines. Machine A renders a low-complexity scene at 140 fps. Machine B renders the same scene at 70 fps. Which is more likely to render a high-complexity scene at >= 60 fps?
Even if your machine is rendering the highest complexity scenes at twice your monitor's refresh rate, programs can still put excess GPU horsepower to work with full-scene motion blur. Draw a scene with objects positioned midway between the last frame and this frame, and blend it 50-50 with this frame, and things start to look smoother for the same reason that a 24 fps live-action motion picture doesn't look jerky.