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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Calin - Wednesday, August 9, 2006 - link
Yep, I feel stoopid :)Anyway, the idea is that a change in memory patterns (SDR to DDR, SDR to RDRAM, DDR to DDR2) is a battle between old very optimised technology, and new, unproven yet technology. The small difference in speed can be explained that "current" technology in processors is built for best performance with current memory - a new memory type often is not optimised for the memory access needed by the processor.
As an example, RDRAM was (just a tad) slower on Pentium !!! (compared to high performance SDRAM). Pentium4, which was bandwidth starved with single channel SDRAM, was much faster with RDRAM (dual channel though) - as much as a P4 2000 (Willamette) with SDRAM was equal to a P4 1600 with RDRAM. As speed increased, needed bandwidth increased too - but the move to dual channel DDR was the final nail in the coffin of RDRAM on PC.
The other example - Athlon64 is not bandwidth starved on current (dual channel DDR400) memory, so doubling memory bandwidth brought no advantage. The decrease in latency was not enough to bring extra performance.
The situation is mostly similar with Core2Duo - more memory bandwidth brings little advantage.
This might change for quad-core processors, as they could use twice the memory bandwidth we see now - or on the Athlon side with a more aggressive prefetching algorithm (which will eat bandwidth bringing data that seem to be useful in the near future).
yacoub - Tuesday, August 8, 2006 - link
"When faced with a limited budget but a desire to have the latest and greatest technology, it is usually has to cut corners"should be "one usually has to cut corners"
yacoub - Tuesday, August 8, 2006 - link
page 2:"...one of the widely used setups in use today." Maybe you like the extra words but you could drop the words "in use" and still be making the same point.
"The memory features average latencies at DDR2-667 but was able to perform at lower latencies in our testing while costing around $70 for a 1GB kit.
{transcend-ddr2.html}" <--- supposed to be a link or image?
JarredWalton - Tuesday, August 8, 2006 - link
Blame the sleepy editor. :|The Transcend table was present, but the supported RAM speeds table was not. I fixed the error, as well as the other two grammar issues you pointed out. Thanks!
yacoub - Tuesday, August 8, 2006 - link
hehe no problem. =)