ASRock 775Dual-VSTA: Does DDR2 matter?
by Gary Key on August 8, 2006 6:35 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Quick Take
It became obvious to us during testing that a user's choice of memory on this particular platform is not going to make a huge difference in the performance of the system. The age old rule about utilizing the highest speed memory at the lowest possible latencies still holds true. This rule was especially evident in our synthetic benchmark testing, but results in our application and game testing told us another story.
This story told us the choice of components like the CPU, motherboard, or graphics card is far more important to the overall performance of the system than our memory selection on this platform. While this is not surprising and certainly not unexpected, it just reinforces the fact that at this price point you can certainly extend the life of your existing DDR memory.
In the future you can worry about major improvements such as an upgraded video card or motherboard and then add higher performing DDR2 memory that will take advantage of these additions. If you have a very limited budget and want to move to the Intel Core 2 Duo processor now, then rest assured that your DDR-400 memory is more than capable for a system like the one tested today.
It became obvious to us during testing that a user's choice of memory on this particular platform is not going to make a huge difference in the performance of the system. The age old rule about utilizing the highest speed memory at the lowest possible latencies still holds true. This rule was especially evident in our synthetic benchmark testing, but results in our application and game testing told us another story.
This story told us the choice of components like the CPU, motherboard, or graphics card is far more important to the overall performance of the system than our memory selection on this platform. While this is not surprising and certainly not unexpected, it just reinforces the fact that at this price point you can certainly extend the life of your existing DDR memory.
In the future you can worry about major improvements such as an upgraded video card or motherboard and then add higher performing DDR2 memory that will take advantage of these additions. If you have a very limited budget and want to move to the Intel Core 2 Duo processor now, then rest assured that your DDR-400 memory is more than capable for a system like the one tested today.
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Kougar - Tuesday, August 8, 2006 - link
They mention the OCing details in their Conroe: Feeding the Monster article. IIRC this board was about 300FSB give or take 5. Not bad, considering the nForce4 & 5 series maxes out at 320 tops!poohbear - Tuesday, August 8, 2006 - link
thanks for this great article, i hope ASrock's efforts w/ PCI-E/agp and ddr/ddr2 solutions gets noticed by some of the big dogs cause im still using my ASrock Dualsata2 and intend on keeping it for my upgrade to dualcore and hang on to it for atleast another year. After that, looks like i'll keep my DDR memory and head on over to the Core duo camp. ASrock really knows how to squeeze the life outta all your components especially since most of these "upgrades" like DDR-DDR2 and AGP-PCI-E do NOT provide ANY performance improvements. just marketing BS so these companies can sell hardware.:(Calin - Wednesday, August 9, 2006 - link
Moving from DDR to DDR2 allows you to buy cheaper components (a bit cheaper). As for AGP and PCI-E, top of the line cards are PCI-E, on AGP you can find only mainstream (maybe because PCI-E x16 gives more juice to the card than AGP can?)poohbear - Wednesday, August 9, 2006 - link
erm, moving to ddr2 isnt cheaper if i hafta ditch my 1gb of ddr ram.;) as for the PCI-E, im taking about bandwidth wise, PCI-E hasnt offered any performance increases at all. Sure, what's available now is only high end PCI-E, but if they did make a high end 7900GTX in AGP im sure it wouldnt perform 1 fps less than the PCI-E version. AGP8x was simply never saturated enough.saiku - Tuesday, August 8, 2006 - link
Yes!! I would love to know if I can bring over my AGP 6800GT and my 2 GB of Ram from my Socket 754 world to the Core 2 Duo platform. Great article !!Anandtech, just when I thought that you had stopped caring about the "common man", here comes this great article !
Thank you for remembering those of us who don't spend 500 bucks on 2 GB of RAM !!
Rike - Tuesday, August 8, 2006 - link
Second that. Thanks, for looking out for those of us who still have some tight budgets.VooDooAddict - Tuesday, August 8, 2006 - link
What I find interesting is that even DDR-333 works very well on the platform.This makes it tempting to upgrade my existing Dual Xeon 2.66 to Core 2 Duo. It's got 2 gigs of low latency (2-2-2-5) DDR-333.
VooDooAddict - Tuesday, August 8, 2006 - link
Also looking forward to the PCIe / AGP comparison.KingofL337 - Tuesday, August 8, 2006 - link
Does this board allow for any overclocking at all?Gary Key - Tuesday, August 8, 2006 - link
Yes, figure about 10~15% on average. There is not a VCore adjustment on the board and it is limited already due to design.