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.'"

Comments

Duh?

[ynososiduts]

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.

Re:Why do these reviews only focus on one thing?

[Slashcrap]

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.

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.