Ddr3 1333 / 1600

[SilverWS602]

Well in 1 week it will be ordered. I can't pass up stepping up my motherboard to a 790i for 100 bucks.

So what do you guys think of DDR3... price aside. I know its 2x (1600 vs 800) the speed of ddr2 800, but realistially I know its not going to be 2x the performance increase.

I'm hoping between that and stepping up to a q9450 and 2 9800GTX's I can break 1500 in PT.

[David (PassMark)]

Often the extra wait states mean DDR3 isn't greatly quicker than good quality DDR2. So don't get your hopes up too high.

Dual video cards in SLI mode also aren't all they are cracked up to be. It is only effective on some limited applications (mostly the really popular 3D games). Same for quad CPUs. Not many applications can fully use 4 cores.

[SilverWS602]

Often the extra wait states mean DDR3 isn't greatly quicker than good quality DDR2. So don't get your hopes up too high.

Dual video cards in SLI mode also aren't all they are cracked up to be. It is only effective on some limited applications (mostly the really popular 3D games). Same for quad CPUs. Not many applications can fully use 4 cores.

You're referring the cas latency I assume? The RAM I am looking at is "fast" DDR3 (comparatively). It's rated at 6-6-6-20 (or 24 i forget). As opposed to my current ddr2 which is 4-4-4-12. The majority of ddr3 I've seen in the cas 7 or 9 range. So this should be a bit better. The reason I'm going for it is the 790i ultra doesnt even support ddr2, so its a "have to" situation.

I've noticed, like you stated, the gains with SLI aren't always there in certain apps. PT is one of them. I've actually seen higher scores with it disabled sometimes. I even tried to configure pt.exe in the nvidia control panel, but that only nets minimal gains.

Ah well such is life!

[SilverWS602]

Just wanted to add -- my memory mark went up over 100 points from the ddr2 - ddr3 switch. Can't really argue there. Just put the system together 2 days ago, so gotta see how it performs in real world apps and if I can time the memory a little tighter

[David (PassMark)]

Did you swap the CPU at the same time? Becuase the CPU speed will effect the RAM test results.

[SilverWS602]

Did you swap the CPU at the same time? Becuase the CPU speed will effect the RAM test results.

Yes and no...

First I put in the RAM only (left my q6600 in), and got a 85pt increase. Adding the CPU throw the other 20 or so pts on there as well.

[mibo]

DDR3 misconception

Basic DRAM latency is a function of the process technology it is built with and does not change as dramatically as we might hope, but we have ever larger caches to hide the latency.
What we need is high transfer speeds to service the cache, and DDR3 does provide this.

despite appearing to have higher latency however, DDR3 does actually have lower latency as the state cycle counts are higher, but cycle counts of a clock that's twice the frequency ( effectively ), so DDR3 is faster.

One thing you will notice however is that with DDR3 you will generally be limited by the FSB speed of the processor, so you won't get double the memory bandwidth.

You will also find that the benefit of interleaving is reduced if not eliminated, I still run it interleaved though it makes less than 3% difference.