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

I need to get out more

[Gilatrout]

I read Intel supports Dance Dance Revolution 3.

I agree

[TheRealFixer]

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.

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.

Ad-free!

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

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!

Why do these reviews only focus on one thing?

[downix]

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....

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.

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

[julesh]

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.

The reason they're only measuring the CPU memory needs is becase the CPU memory needs dwarf all others.

Max CPU memory access rate (Intel Core 2 @ 1333FSB) = 10.7 GB/s
Max PCIe memory access rate (16 lanes @ 2500MH/z) = 4 GB/s

Total 14.7GB/s over 2 lanes of memory = 7.35GB/s ~= 1800MHz. So, if both your CPU and your I/O devices are running at 100% capacity on a current high end system, you might benefit from DDR3 memory (2GB for £406 from my usual supplier). If, however, you can put up with not using 100% of your CPU capacity when you need to use your I/O capacity (I think most people can, you know) you can get 10.7GB/s with DDR2/667, (2GB for £56 from my usual supplier).

I don't see why the faster memory is worth paying enough extra that I could buy an entire extra computer instead, when I will only use it in the rare case I'm maxing out both I/O bandwidth and CPU bandwidth.

They never learn. Technology marches on.

[Rod Beauvex]

60ns SIMMs ought to be fast enough for anybody.

In a year's time, DDR3 will have totally supplanted DDR2.

Didn't this happen before?

[xx01dk]

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.

Re:Didn't this happen before?

[Zephiris]

Part of the reason that DDR2 was so much slower at most clockspeeds is because of the added latency. The lower speed DDR2 can have more than twice the tested latency of DDR400. The problem is that apparently both JEDIC, or whoever standardizes memory now, isn't thinking of what is the best direction for DDR to take. They're going in the same direction as the manufacturers, trying to sell higher "Megahertz" and "gigabytes per second" ratings, even when they're effectively meaningless now.

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.

"Fast" DDR2 isn't just for overclocking

[A Friendly Troll]

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.

Re:"Fast" DDR2 isn't just for overclocking

[Corporate Troll]

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.

To every season, turn turn turn

[Applekid]

I remember the same discussion when DDR2 was hitting stores.

It's The Drives, Stupid

[maz2331]

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.

Re:4X4

[ZachPruckowski]

On a dual-processor Intel machine, you have to move to FB-DIMMs. I'm not sure if there are currently DDR3 FB-DIMMs, but I don't think so. If there were DDR3 FB-DIMMs, they'd also be quad-channel.

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

[TheRaven64]

Intel, when they are prototyping a new CPU, run it in a simulator. This simulates an entire computer, and is very tweakable. A few years ago, they did an experiment; they made every CPU operation take no simulated time. Effectively, this meant that the CPU was infinitely fast. In their standard benchmark suite, they showed a 2-5x performance improvement overall. After doing this, however, increasing the speed of RAM and the disk gave significant improvements.

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.

Comma comma down doobie doo down down

[Anonymous Coward]

This, is a, great article, and I will, read, it again and, again.

Re:Comma comma down doobie doo down down

[Just Some Guy]

Who knew, William Shatner, wrote, tech articles?

Any good transitional mobos?

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

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.

Or technically illiterate people

[Moraelin]

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.

Question

[rehtonAesoohC]

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?