DDR3 RAM Explained

Das Capitolin sends us to Benchmark Reviews for an in-depth feature on DDR3 memory that begins: "These are uncertain financial times we live in today, and the rise and fall of our economy has had [a] direct [effect] on consumer spending. It has already been one full year now that DDR3 has been patiently waiting for the enthusiast community to give it proper consideration, yet [its] success is still undermined by misconceptions and high price. Benchmark Reviews has been testing DDR3 more actively than anyone. ... Sadly, it might take an article like this to open the eyes of my fellow hardware enthusiast[s] and overclocker[s], because it seems like DDR3 is the technology nobody wants [badly] enough to learn about. Pity, because overclocking is what it's all about."

Comments

Just a tad over the top?

[florin]

This article was rather amusing, at times I wasn't quite sure if the author was serious, with statements like:

One particularly important new change introduced with DDR3 is in the improved prefetch buffer: up from DDR2's four bits to an astounding eight bits per cycle. Woo I think I wet my pants there. But the author seems genuinely excited about this technology. I mean:

DDR3 is very similar to the advancement of jet propulsion over prop-style aircraft, and an entirely new dimension of possibility is made available. Hahaha

How about a DDR2 versus DDR3 chart?

[PoderOmega]

Great, now that I know how well certain DDR3 chips overclock, can I see how DDR3 compares to DDR2 in terms of raw performance and overclocking ability? I'm not an expert on how DDR2 works, so DDR3 could be better explained to me by showing me how it is better than DDR2.

Re:not cost effective for the performance gain

[halivar]

Exactly. I'm not buying a product whose only real advantage comes when you void the warranty.

Re:not cost effective for the performance gain

[aztektum]

And to take it even further, that's just the cost of memory. A quick NewEgg search for DDR3 motherboard came up with a whopping 10 boards. The cheapest are 150 for open box items. The typical price is over 300.

We Drink Ritalin

[tepples]

Tell me when DDR5 is ready. Wikipedia says DDR5 was ready on 2001-03-27.

Teenage enthusiasm

[klapaucjusz]

It's always nice to see a tech writer full of teenage enthusiasm, but this article goes a little over the top.

It's supposed to be an article about a performance enhancement, and there's barely any performance values at all (except for the theoretical peak throughputs on page 3, and we know how much that means).

I think what the guy really wanted was to write about planes, not about computer hardware.

DDR3 simply picks up speed where DDR2 left off... which is as accurate as saying an airplane picks up where a kite left off.

DDR2 technology is no better prepared to reach higher speeds than a propeller airplane is capable of breaking the sound barrier;

DDR3 is very similar to the advancement of jet propulsion over prop-style aircraft,

No advantage to DDR3 (?)

[DJStealth]

I was asked to purchase 4 of the fastest desktop PC's I could find (just less than a year ago) for a contract placement; I ended up going with the QX6850 and for 3 machines DDR2-800, and with the extra money on the 4th machine, going with a capable motherboard and DDR3-1333; hoping for at least some speed difference.

First of all, as the technology was brand new at the time, the motherboard, although capable of 1333mhz ram, it only detected it as 1066 (we double checked they sold us the right stuff), so we manually set the RAM in the BIOS to run at 1333.

After all the setup, on otherwise almost identically configured machines, we found absolutely 0 performance gain on the DDR3 machine over the other 3 DDR2-800 machines. Although one might argue that our applications we were using to test were not so memory intensive, the fact is it was a computationally intensive task that regularly accessed about 200-300mb of data from ram. I would think that even if everything would be pre-fetched into the 8MB CPU cache before it was used, we should at least see some small difference.

In the end, it seems that we spent an extra $800 for no noticeable performance gain.

Re:Just a tad over the top? No ECC = NO buy

[Zeio]

I really like ECC memory. I've built a lot of machines here and there for various purposes and people and can safely say that ECC should be mandated. People oft talk of blue screens, panics, etc. A lot of these are due to bad memory. And these types of errors can often be hard to replicate. I believe EETimes had an article about how bad bad memory is.

Anyhow, I'm on a 975X chipset with 4GB of DDR2 800 MHZ unbuffered ECC memory machine now. Not a single unforced error since I bought this machine and assembled it December, 2006. Nothing. This unit is primarily a gaming rig, the 3DMark 2006 score is 11500 with an 8800GTX, all with ECC memory.

The most irritating thing for me is, looking at the great new CPUs available, is the utter lack of any unbuffered ECC memory in the DDR3 range. This to me is unacceptable. I refuse to compromise so I will wait. Intel has a motherboard featuring DDR2 800 fully buffered memory for the 'high end workstation' , D5400XS, this is $600+. Supermicro offers something similar.

The X38 does DDR2 ECC, and for whatever reason the X48 took that away. I don't get why Intel wants to deny us DDR3 unbuffered ECC? Its really a selling point, a very good thing. If you overclock, its nice to have because it can tell you the limits minus the guesswork, not that I would bother with OC personally.

Fundamentally, without ECC, do you even know if the memory works at all? My experience leads me to believe that without ECC present, the answer is no at all.