DDR2-800 vs DDR3-1333, Does Speed Matter?

Feb 11, 2008 (Click to Rate!) Loading ...

Summary: NO (Incase you don’t want to read further)

I set out to build myself a new desktop recently and one of the decisions I had to make was “Do I go with DDR3, or stick with DDR2?”, then of course if you stick with DDR2, do you go with oldie 800 ram or shoot for the 1066 or higher but pay the premium? I wasn’t sure at the time, so I set out to some do some research, and here is what I found…

First off, DDR3 has been on the market for a while now, but you never hear about it for 2 reasons:

It’s expensive as hell, usually about 2x the price of DDR2 ram or more.
There is no noticeable performance improvement using it.

The reason for #2 is the same reason DDR2 wasn’t awesome right away when it first came out: the latencies are much higher and even though the bandwidth ceiling is much higher, we aren’t even maxing out what we have already… so it’s a moot point.

I was originally looking at building a machine using the Intel QX9650 and figured a quad-core beast with a 1333mhz FSB would definately need either DDR3 ram or the highest end DDR2 (1600?) RAM I could scrounge up.

Once I went looking and prices and realized that in some cases the price of 1GB of expensive DDR3 ram was the same price was 4GBs of DDR2-800 ram, I decided to look up some benchmarks to see if this mess was even worth it.

NOTE: For the folks that didn’t do a lot of computing in the 90s and building their own machines, finding “good” ram with awesome “timings” like 1 and 2 CAS latencies used to make a big difference, especially in gaming. But as computers have gotten faster and faster the difference good memory allows is completely negligible now except for overall stability… that is still important when buying good ram.

As I trapes’ed my way around online I ran across a great benchmark from Digit-Life comparing DDR2-800 to DDR3-1333… memory that couldn’t be farther apart on the performance scale; and exactly what I wanted. If there was a benefit to DDR3 this benchmark was going to make it clear.

The other great thing about this benchmark is that it used both the new, unreleased QX9770 and the QX9650 to saturate the memory with the fastest quad-core CPUs available today (and likely for the next 6 months). The results were surprising to say the least.

I immediately scrolled down to the most CPU-intensive task I could find, Video Encoding:

notice that there is absolutely no difference between the DDR2-800 and DDR3-1333 setups during this task?

Then I scrolled down to a normalized gaming score between the two and again, found almost absolutely no difference:

I figured with the added bandwidth provided by DDR3 that games atleast would be running faster with so much texture work to push, but apparently we aren’t even making full use of that is provided by DDR2-800 at this point… meaning something else in the PC is the bottleneck.

This is equatable to how SATA-2 connections allow for a 3GB/sec bandwidth right now, but a typical SATA hard drive will burst around 110MB/sec and sustain around 50-70MB/sec… no where near the 3GB/sec cap on the bus (unless you had some insane RAID setup).

So the good news from all of this is that you can safely buy DDR2-800 ram for $40/GB instead of the fucking crazy DDR3 ram for the forseeable future.

And don’t even bother with DDR2-1066 or higher DDR2 ram… I found benchmarks on those as well comparing to DDR2-800 that again showed almost no difference in performance.

Share and Enjoy:

Computing, memory, performance

This post was written by:

Riyad Kalla - who has written 1727 posts on The “Break it Down” Blog.

"Ultimately I just want to provide a resource that folks find useful."

67 Comments For This Post

Ralph Kradolfer Says:
February 20th, 2008 at 2:24 pm

Thanks a lot for your research, you saved a lot of (my) money

Riyad Kalla Says:
February 20th, 2008 at 2:37 pm

Ralph, I’m glad I could help!

Nelton Says:
March 18th, 2008 at 8:17 am

Dear Riyad,
can you send me your pc specs? Maybe you also did some tests like 3D mark as well?
I’m trying to put a game-pc together for a low price and still good enough to play recent games in good resolutions…

Riyad Kalla Says:
March 18th, 2008 at 8:39 am

Nelton,
The machine turned out being *awesome*, I am really happy with it about 70% because of it’s performance being better than I expected (the 8800 is a hell of a card) and 30% because the price was so damn cheap. I thikn you could build this machine for like $1400 today (NOTE: I didn’t need a monitor, if you need a monitor too it will be closer to $2k or 2100)

* 3.0 Ghz Dual Core E6850
* 4GB 800mhz DDR2 Ram (Corsair)
* BFG 8800 GT (the new 512mb GT that is as fast as the Ultra cards, not the original 256mb one)
* Corsair 620 watt Modular PSU
* 2x Seagate ES.2 750 GB Drives (the enterprise-SATA ones)
* ASUS MAXIMUS FORMULA

All of the hardware is great but I WOULD NOT recommend the ASUS boards anymore. The computer actually hangs on bootup at the memory detection phase (I tried 4GB of Crucial and Corsair, same thing) randomly. It’s a known issue that has not and may not be fixed by ASUS, I’m relaly annoyed by that. Luckily hitting the Bios-wipe button lets me reboot… but that means I can never successfully make any modifications to the BIOS and use the computer… luckily I don’t but it’s a fucked up position ot be in.

jz Says:
March 26th, 2008 at 1:58 am

Great post! But I have to wonder why. 3-4 years back I bought a P4 3.2ghz northwood system with pc3200 dual channel memory which was twice as fast as my old system. All benchmarks were about 2X. Everything was about double my P1.6ghz (oc to 2.1ghz). I knew the ram was about double the speed. The system was responsive and fast. It couldn’t be just because the cpu was changed.

Comparing 800mhz to 1333mhz shows a 1% change in speed. But current computers are about double the speed of my system 3-4 years back with 400mhz ram.

So I now wonder. If I could put a new Q6600 quad OC’d to 3.6ghz with the older 400mhz ram. Would the ram be a bottle neck? Would it slow things down? OR could we simply just put 400mhz ram in new systems and have the same results?

If it’s true that 800mhz is needed today instead of 400mhz, then I would think that there must be a sweet spot for ram for these cpu’s. That’s what my guess is, but I have no way to prove it. If this is true, then it might mean that DDR3 will SOMEDAY be very useful if we get CPU’s that are maybe 1.5X to 2X faster than what we have now. Say maybe 2 years from now. It’s just a guess. But for today, I can see 1333 is a huge waste to build a new system. Thanks for the advise.

jz Says:
March 26th, 2008 at 2:00 am

One other thought. Maybe those benchmarks are not improved much with faster ram. Could there be some other type of applications that would give a 66% speed improvement? Or probably not? If not, it must be that the cpu is the bottleneck somehow. hmmm.

Riyad Kalla Says:
March 26th, 2008 at 6:44 am

jz,
I’m glad the article helped. There are two factors with ram that make it “fast”, and they seem to be mutually exclusive, they are:

* Latency
* Bandwidth

For some reason it seems impossible to have both, you either have 1 or the other. For example, most of these DDR2 sticks of ram have latencies of 2 and 3, but low bandwidth.

DDR3 is ultra-high-bandwidth, but has latencies of 5, 6 and 7. Twice as much latency as the DDR2 pieces.

So the question becomes “what will I see the biggest benefit from today?” and as you correctly stated, a lower latency stick of RAM is going to serve you better with today’s CPUs and peripherals than a higher latency ultra-fat-bandwidth stick of ram.

In a few years where games like Crysis are the norm, and to play a game you have to stream Gigabytes off your 300 MB/sec solid state hard drive, then ultra-high-bandwidth ram that can handle streaming insane amounts of data si going to be necessary and your lower-latency ram won’t make such a difference.

This is sort of the premise of the PS3, it doesn’t have that much ram on it, and *everything* is designed to be considered a stream… streaming audio, graphics, video, etc. but it does it as an insanely high rate of speed.

Honestly I expect whatever Nehalem+1 to really shine and Nehalem+2 to be truely next-next gen where DDR3/4 are “Absolutely necessary”.

So probably like 24/32 months from now. We should have the first Nehalem chips drop at the end of this year, so we’ll get a peak at what will come with the new redesign, but probably be 2010 before our pants are blown off by it.

jean Says:
July 2nd, 2008 at 2:32 am

thanks for this great comment on ddr2-ddr3, idont know too much about memory latency and stuff but wanted to do some research first on ram befre deciding to go for a ddr2 or ddr3 mobo

Riyad Kalla Says:
July 2nd, 2008 at 1:44 pm

Jean,
No problem. I really don’t expect computers to take advantage of DDR3 ram and beyond until Intel releases Nehalem chips at the end of this year and into 2009. I’m sure in 2010 CPUs will be quite a bit faster and using higher bandwidth RAM. 2009 will be a year of CPU speed growth hopefully.

Ratul Says:
July 4th, 2008 at 1:23 pm

The Sweet spot for core 2 duo (memory wise ) is ddr 667. Look in wikipedia for more details.

Mitra Says:
July 7th, 2008 at 10:07 pm

Dude… Try it on the latest Core 2 Quad.

Riyad Kalla Says:
July 7th, 2008 at 10:17 pm

Mitra,
That is what the QX9770 is. Seriously, you aren’t going to start seeing performance differences until these chips are 4Ghz+ I don’t think.

Either way Nehalem is going to be DDR3 only I believe, so we are all going to revamping our systems next year anyway.

But if you want to build a fast budget machine, DDR2-800 all the way.

roy Says:
July 24th, 2008 at 2:23 pm

you chose only benchmarks that don’t need memory bandwidth, so of course you wont see any difference in performance.

Riyad Kalla Says:
July 24th, 2008 at 9:06 pm

Roy,

Please clarify how Video Encoding and Games aren’t memory-bandwidth intensive.

Besides running a straight-up memory bandwidth test, I can’t think of any other *normal* use for a computer that would use more memory bandwidth.

After all the purpose of the article is to point out that with current CPUs on the market, DDR2-800 ram is going to give you the same performance as high-speed DDR3 ram because the other components in the computer just aren’t saturating the existing memory subsystem.

So using a complete synthetic test that would never occur in the real world (synthetic bandwidth test) doesn’t help, because in the end everybody doing normal work with their PC are never going to realize those performance benefits.

vst Says:
August 5th, 2008 at 8:21 am

Thanks for that. I’m going to upgrade my pc which I’m using for music (VST, Ableton and other stuff like this) and I’m going for DDR2. By this time when DDR3 will be good as DDR2 became the technological step forward will be so long that my next upgrade will be to DDR4

Cheers – Matt.

Editor Says:
August 5th, 2008 at 10:23 am

vst,

Glad it helped! And you are right, Nehalem (Intel’s next-gen) will required DDR3 and it’s due out late this year or early next, but with no competition from AMD, Intel is ramping up really slowly.

I have to imagine by the time they refine Nehalem or come out with Nehalem+1 (2 years from now) we will be onto DDR4 just like you said and be dealing with things like integrated CPU/GPUs that Intel is showing off and AMD/ATI are working on.

At that point, with so much happening “on the chip” I could certainly see a need for insanely high bandwidth that DDR4 will offer… but until then, like you said, DDR2 is still serving us just fine.

Alan Says:
August 8th, 2008 at 7:48 am

Editor
I find your article refreshing in comparison to many others revealing why ddr3 is now (as of mid 2008) a good reason to buy when compared to ddr2.
I found that many people asked (in forums) should I buy ddr2 800 or ddr3 1600? Most asked this question because they were wanting to build a new system. I think the answer has always been if you don’t value money then buy and build a ddr3 system. Otherwise look at this cost comparison:

scenario (ddr3)
Memory: 4Gb (2×2gb)ddr3 1600 (cas 6) GSkill – $295
Motherboard: nForce 790i Ultra SLI ddr3 EVGA – $320
CPU: E8500 Wolfdale Intel (3.16Ghz) – $190
Cost: $805
———————————————-
scenario (ddr2)
Memory: 4Gb (2×2gb)ddr2 800 (cas 4) OCZ – $65
Motherboard: nForce 780i Ultra SLI ddr2 EVGA – $220
CPU: Q9450 Yorkfield Intel (2.66Ghz) – $310
Total Cost: $595

Basically if you go with ddr2 system you save at total of $205 and a get a quad core instead of a dual core. Yes you might say the clock speed is slower on the quad and the memory bandwidth is less but with $205 saved you can get a good graphics card (maybe a 9800 GX2) which will boost your gaming experience and beat the other system – plus quad will mean that you overall application/system experience will be better/faster (esp. with Vista 64bit).

Alan Says:
August 8th, 2008 at 7:50 am

Correction your saving is $210

Editor Says:
August 11th, 2008 at 10:13 am

Alan,
You are exactly right. Not only on the savings but also on the folks that tend to drop the big bucks on the DDR3 ram, they just don’t care and want the braging rights.

Hopefully by the end of this year we’ll start to see DDR3 pull away from DDR2, but for the time being I’m just not seeing it.

David Says:
October 9th, 2008 at 1:55 pm

Just the information i needed! Thank’s a lot!

Editor Says:
October 9th, 2008 at 11:40 pm

No problem, glad it helped!

Charles Says:
December 1st, 2008 at 12:51 am

You are tha man! Thanks a lot… work on some keyword phrases like 800 1066 1333 comparison so everyone can find you easily

I had to search for “computer performance ddr2 comparison 800 1066 1333″ hahah everything else was useless…

Riyad Kalla Says:
December 1st, 2008 at 5:41 am

Charles,

Thanks for the heads up, I think you are right, we could do a better job promoting this.

With Nehalem (Core i7) finally out though the landscape needs to be re-evaluated it as those chips do begin to take advantage of the DDR3 memory… so we may have to take another look at memory performance here in the following months for the cutting-edge readers (if I built a new machine today, I’d still do DDR2, it’s so damn cheap)

Ridwan Says:
December 4th, 2008 at 3:26 am

this is really interesting !
they have the DDR3 in the macs and that was one reason for me to buy it but now, i think i’ll continue with the pc operating system …

Roger Says:
December 14th, 2008 at 8:41 am

Dude this is the bomb so glad i found your article but with the I7 out now what do i do? I have been buying piece by piece case coolermaster 830 abs 1100w tagan modular psu but have held off once i saw the i7 coming out with buying the motherboard Should i buy the i7 what are the advantages over that board opposed to the 775 boards? I use the comp mainly for music D.J. Business and am debating using it as a home dvr blu ray player/ media center. so primarily home use but occasional music and video playing

Riyad Kalla Says:
December 14th, 2008 at 9:51 am

Roger,

You are picking a perfect time to go shopping, the prices of RAM in general just dropped through the goddamn floor. 6GB (yes 6!) of nice-ass DDR3 ram is $270 (Newegg).

I couldn’t believe that when I ran across it.

Also I would highly encourage you to look into building the i7 machine. The performance of the Core i7 chips is on average 25% faster across the board than Core 2 was and the 2nd or 3rd from the top fastest quad-core CPUs are pretty damn reasonably priced.

In the past where you got taken to the cleaners with a new platform like i7 was the motherboard and the ram, this time around, RAM is dirt cheap but the motherboards are still a bit more expensive. It’s all a wash in the end.

Say $500 or so for the CPU, $200 for the RAM (4GB), and $300 for the mobo, about $1k for a hell of a machine.

I’d suggest that not because of your use-case (business, DJ, music, movies) but just because it’s such a cheap price tag for an excellent performing machine.

As far as a specific motherboard to get, I no longer have a preference. I used to be a die-hard ASUS fan until my most recent ASUS purchase drove me crazy for months before a firmware fix came out to correct the issue. Now I don’t know if it much matters, I’d probably stick with one of the big-name players, but they are all pretty competitive price-wise.

Let us know what you end up getting.

Tony Says:
December 24th, 2008 at 3:21 am

Good info. Worth reading.

I will soon be building a new core i7 gaming/video editing machine. I have a question though, you said ddr3 takes advantage of this new platform. How is this and would it be a good performance increase from ddr2 800mhz?

I’m very excited as I heard the core i7 helps tremendously for multi-gpu setups.

I’ve also heard of intel releasing a smaller die shink i7 next year so I might wait and hopefully ddr3 prices drop even more. What do you think about that?

Thanks

Riyad Kalla Says:
December 24th, 2008 at 6:21 am

Tony,

The Core i7 platform was engineered for DDR3, so there is no getting around it there. Fortunately the cost of DDR3 has dropped through the floor, so you can pick up plenty of it for cheap now.

Also Intel always does a “tick-tock” yearly release cycle. More specifically, in 2008 they released a new die and next year they will introduce the shrunken version of it with a few enhancements. The year after that they will introduce a new die, and the year after that, the shrunken version of it.

So yes, if you want to wait until Q42009 for your new machine, you can probably grab the die-shrunk version of the Core i7, which I think will be 32nm.

Bryan Says:
January 14th, 2009 at 2:29 pm

Yep, Westmere, the 32mn die-shrink of Nehalem will be out Q4 this year.

I just wanted to say “thank you” for this neat little write-up. I was debating while saving up for my next build (oh, the mind-games we play) whether to get 4 gigs of DDR3 or the 8 gigs of DDR2. Your article makes it clear that 8 gigs of DDR2 is both cheaper and a better use of my money.

I would love to just get a Westmere when they come out, but I think the RAM, board, and chip will still be out of my budget. A quick map:

2008, Nehalem, 45nm —>2009, Westmere, 32nm
2010, Sandy Bridge, 32nm —> 2011 —-> Ivy Bridge, 22nm
2012, Haswell, 22nm —-> ?

~Bryan

Riyad Kalla Says:
January 14th, 2009 at 5:35 pm

Bryan,

Thanks for laying it out, didn’t actually know the shrink was coming this year. Might make for some great Christmas shopping!

DragonFly Says:
February 10th, 2009 at 4:03 am

ive got 4 gig of ddr2 830 in my pc, but its running on 667 speeds, how do i correct this so that it runs on the correct speeds? please someone help!!!

daniel Says:
February 27th, 2009 at 9:56 am

wow thanks heaps! I had heard about this and am building a new pc so.. very helpful info Riyad!

Riyad Kalla Says:
February 27th, 2009 at 10:24 am

Daniel,

Glad we could help. If you are building a new Core i7-based machine though (highly recommended) you’ll be using DDR3 anyway — and luckily the price has fallen quite a bit after everyone got sued in that Classaction lawsuit pertaining to price-fixing… so DDR3 doesn’t carry the price premium it did back when this article was written.

Hope that helps.

Navi Says:
March 22nd, 2009 at 12:17 am

Well If your used to upgrade then wait for DDR3 to become dirt cheap.

Then upgrade from DDR2 to DDR3. Cause by that time the performance difference would be so high that you would start to see the difference without any benchmark.(That’s when 1 shud upgrade, when difference can be seen by your eyes}

Cause whats the point of upgrade to DDR3 when no current processor can saturate the DDR2?

My advice== Go with latest CPU + HIGH Performance Graphic Card+ Shit loads of DDR2 800hz RAM + Minimum 500GB SATA == [for 2 yrs neeed not to upgrade.]

And Please don’t Listen to any1 saying go DDR3 u would be future proof. Cause the guy who use future proof with Computers shudn’t be listened to.
Remember== the motherboard that supports DDR3 now at premium Price will be Dirt cheap by the time DDR3 becomes norm of the day.(And with the same price you would be able to buy Motherboard that would Support DDR4 + Very high speed DDR3(Yes DDR3 is going to get hell a lot faster just like DDR2 did)

So you are not loosing on any front= Performance or Money.

QueSeYo Says:
April 9th, 2009 at 1:56 pm

Thx a lot. I was really freak out about getting another motherboard, because I´m going to change my E2180 (2×2GB 800Mhz) to E6850 (2×2GB 800Mhz) and i was having a bottle neck with my Gf8600GT OC 256MB. But i will check it out when i bring the new 8800GT to my config and see with the old and new config (old cpu – new cpu). I hope my CPU or my Memorys dont bottleneck, is all I care about…

Ciscoed Says:
April 12th, 2009 at 7:06 am

The price of DDR3 has fallen drastically over the past few months. The price difference between DDR3 and DDR2 is comparable. You can check it out at site like newegg.com.

Riyad Kalla Says:
April 13th, 2009 at 7:49 am

No doubt, check out this 6GB bundle of Corsair DDR3 RAM for $100 — insane.

For those of us that don’t want to get an SSD yet and wait for the technology to mature, with Windows 7 (And possibly VIsta to a lesser extent) with the insane amount of cashing the OS provides, 12GB of RAM for $200 should be a really nice middle ground for faster load times.

Leo Says:
April 14th, 2009 at 7:28 pm

great article. it was indeed informative and very pleasant to read. though i still feel hesitant to buy a new notebook. i really want it to be future proof. i can’t jump the gun and pick up a quad extreme dell m4400 notebook. it’s listed that it uses ddr2.. would this be a good buy? a rep said she could configure it to be 64bit but could not make it ddr3..

Bryan Says:
April 14th, 2009 at 8:07 pm

Leo, there is no such thing as “future proof.” It is a misnomer at best. As the saying goes, “Today’s technology is tomorrow’s trash.” I am not trying to be nasty, just pointing out that attempting to buy something that is “future proof” is an exercise in futility. At some point, you just need to buy what is out there, and understand that one day it will be out on the curb.

Leo Says:
April 14th, 2009 at 9:38 pm

i do understand that completely :/ though i would like to pick up something that will be relatively competitive in the future market

Riyad Kalla Says:
April 15th, 2009 at 8:20 am

Leo,

If you want something as “future proof” as you can get in a desktop, get a Core i7-based machine. 920 or so should be fantastic for 3 years or so with 6GB or more of ram (about $100/6gb right now for DDR3 at Newegg).

If you want a “future proof” laptop, that’s a bit harder, because the i7 series chips haven’t been shrunk yet to go into laptops, so you’d be buying last-gen Core 2-based chips.

If you *can* wait, I’d really suggest waiting until next year when Core i7 goes to the mobile platforms along with Windows 7 — I’m not suggesting you have to get Windows 7, I just believe that with the release of W7 later this year, we’ll see a huge push-down in pricing for SSDs in laptops and next year you’d be able to get 4GB+ RAM, SSD and possibly a mobile Core i7-based CPU in a laptop pretty affordibly — that’ll last a long longer for you performance-wise than anything you buy now.

I’m also curious to see how the NVIDIA, AMD and Intel mobile “all in one” platforms pan out in driving down the cost of mobile devices with strong performance characteristics.

You can tell we are “winding down” out of the existing technology stacks and previous-gen hardware because everything is cheap as shit… this usually happens for 6-10 months before new technology stacks drop and dominate the market with the higher-end prices. You can give that time to settle this year and pick something up nice and new Q1 2010 if you can wait.

Leo Says:
April 15th, 2009 at 8:55 am

Great reply riyad! You’re definitely right about future proofing a laptop. I was actually reading about i7 mobile chips possibly being in production by Q4-09.. That’s definitely an incentive to wait for ‘10 and go with a quad 64bit w7 ThinkPad (hopefully with xp downgrade-able).

Though today I can get a great deal which I am debating.. Since it’s not quad core or actually utilizes the supported ddr3 as the i7’s do. Specs are:
ThinkPad T500 ($1698 + Warranty)
-T9600 2.8GHz 1066MHz 6MBL2
-Genuine Windows Vista Business 64 & XP restore DVD -15.4 WXGA TFT, w/ LED Backlight
-ATI Mobility Radeon 3650 with 256MB with Intel Advanced Management Technology
-4 GB PC3-8500 DDR3 SDRAM 1067MHz SODIMM Memory)
-320 GB Hard Disk Drive, 7200rpm ect++

Such an overwhelming decision.. I could wait to caress a newly built notebook but sighhh! My main use in the notebook will be for audio production (ableton live 8, reason4, native instruments komplete 5). Never really game.. Other than that, movie viewing/visualizers, basic word processing, photoshopping, internetting/streaming, and spread sheet processing on the side.

any more help will be appreciated to the max!

Riyad Kalla Says:
April 15th, 2009 at 10:37 am

Leo,

Ha! I’ve been watching the same Lenovo coupons — did you see that 20% off one that came out today for the X-series? (I love the X301).

I really do like Lenovos, I’ve had my T60 for about 2.5 years now and it still performs fine for what I use it for.

I don’t know that much about the memory requirements for audio processing, but it looks like that machine would handle that without much of a problem… I’m all hung up on getting a new laptop until I can get a SSD affordibly in one… with a desktop you can just put in so much memory that an SSD isn’t required, with a laptop, it’s the most common bottleneck I”ve run into (software like Java IDEs) — the performance boost in a laptop from an SSD is night and day, I just don’t think that $510 Lenovo wants for the 128gb Samsung is worth it just yet (Especially with it being the new hotness in the computer market).

Do you really need the laptop now, in which case, go for it. That’s a great buy… or do you just really *want* the new laptop now?

I sort of feel like Bryan does — if you need the computer, buy it without much consternation, I’m sure it will work great even if you upgrade it with an SSD next year and throw Windows 7 on it or something.

I really don’t recall a night-and-day difference in performance between Intel platforms when it was actually placed into a new machine (P4 to Core 1, Core 1 to Core 2, etc.), so I don’t think you’ll hate yourself if you get a smoking deal now and just live with it for a few years.

BTW, I think you can save like $400 if you get the 2.53ghz CPU instead of the 2.8 — I haven’t looked in a few weeks, but I thought I remember the price-gap pretty big, if you could get that T500 with a slower CPU and an SSD, I think you’d be happy as a clam.

(but then again, I don’t know anything about audio processing, not such how much that extra 300mhz is helping you)

Riyad Kalla Says:
April 15th, 2009 at 10:48 am

Leo,

Here’s the coupon I was talking about, 2-days only:
======================================

Lenovo 2 day sale – 20% off Thinkpad X and more, Apr 15

Lenovo offers 15% – 20% off on select notebooks for 4/15 – 4/16 only.

Use eCoupon “USPSTPATSSALE” in cart.

* 20% off ThinkPad X Notebooks
* 20% off ThinkPad X Tablet
* 20% off ThinkPad W Series laptops
* 15% off – ThinkPad T, SL and R Series laptops
* 20% off accessories (monitors excluded)

Leo Says:
April 15th, 2009 at 12:54 pm

Again! Thanks for the quick response

I appreciate you showing me the codes so I don’t have to customize my book through the spring deal page. I went to see what kind of price I could get on a w700 and I come to check out and try the code, but it states that it is not valid. Maybe it was automatically applied. I wish they offered the w500 with a quad core.. I would be all over that..

The x301 is a beauty. I do need a lot more power though. Audio processing is very meticulous as latency and CPU load is very crucial. This is why I want to max out my performance. I would rather spend the extra money on the CPU and upgrade to a MLC SSD in the future as prices drop and storage increases!

I sort of WANT and NEED a laptop now.. Haha I guess it’s a little bit of both. My current specs are still stuck in 06..

Gateway Laptop – MX6446 – about 2.5 years old
CPU – AMD Turion 64 MK-36 (single core 1.99gHz)
Ram – 2GB (upgraded)
HDD – 100GB 7200rpm (upgraded) ultra-ata (lol sad)
GPU – ATI Radeon Xpress 1150 (integrated) shared 128 mb
OS – XP Pro 32bit SP3

So sad and so combobulated. I want to be a happy clam, lol

Leo Says:
April 15th, 2009 at 1:22 pm

discombobulated**

Riyad Kalla Says:
April 15th, 2009 at 9:12 pm

Leo, I know the feeling. I guess if I were in your shoes I’d go dig up some benchmarks on the AMD MK-36 compared to the Intel T9600 with processor intensive tasks (like WinRAR, video encoding, LAME encoding, etc.) and see if the gap is a 100% or more jump in performance.

That should give you a good feel for what kind of awesome the upgrade will have in store for you or if you should wait for the Core i7 and hobble along a bit longer.

This might sorta help, but then again I don’t know what tests “CPU Mark” runs to determine a score: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup.php?cpu=AMD+Turion+64+Mobile+MK-36

Kevin Says:
April 16th, 2009 at 2:41 am

… Are you really that stupid?

The video encoding doesn’t depend on Ram. It depends mostly on the CPU thus rendering the Ram pretty useless.

Games=Cpu and Gpu Mostly.

Other than that, you are right. DDR3 consumes less power and only has a 10-15% boost

Riyad Kalla Says:
April 16th, 2009 at 9:13 am

Kevin, I need a mailing address for you so I can send you a giant “I Won at the Internet” trophy I have sitting here for you.

Riyad Kalla Says:
April 16th, 2009 at 2:59 pm

Leo,

Just saw this on Anandtech today, some more information about Intel’s 32nm Core i7 chips that are gonna get a core-bump on desktop and shrunk down for Notebooks.

Leo Says:
April 16th, 2009 at 3:20 pm

Riyad, I checked out that “CPU MARK” link for my CPU and compared it to the T9600. T9600 basically tripled the MK-36 score! The QX9300 easily quadrupled my puny Turion.

“CPU tests Mathematical operations, compression, encryption, SSE…”

I will definitely be happy if I bought a T500 with a T9600 or a W700 with a QX9300 today. BUT if I wait longer, I’ll be able to save more money and sport around a 32nm Duo/Quad in a 15″ Lenovo, (hopefully). 17″ is a bit big for my taste and preference.

Also THANKS for the informative link. I’ve found more info on the same topics:

http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20090326PD208.html

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/index.cfm?NewsID=113156

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Montevina-Plus-Processors-to-Enable-Affordable-Ultraportables-108071.shtml

http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2009/02/intel_westmere_32nm_integrates_graphics_in_the_cpu.html

http://www.intel.com/corporate/pressroom/emea/deu/cebit/pdfs/CeBIT_Client_Tech_Briefing.pdf

http://www.electronista.com/articles/09/03/20/intel.2ghz.atom.in.april/

Kevin, seriously, why do you have to be a douche? Can’t you get along and offer positive criticism?

Bryan Says:
April 16th, 2009 at 4:12 pm

Negativity = Not so helpful.

Positive, Well-Intentioned Advice = Perhaps helpful.

danimal Says:
May 9th, 2009 at 1:51 pm

kevin is confused, and there are some points in this article that were not addressed; specifically, the effects of overclocking the cpu.

while it’s true that fast ddr2 provides plenty of bandwidth, it also limits your overclocking ability… with ddr3, if you can get the 1:2 multiplier that you couldn’t get with ddr2, you’ll be able to run the fsb at 500mhz, depending on the cpu… which translates into a substantial increase in cpu frequency, or to put it another way, the ability to encode video and such in a shorter period of time.

i don’t think that anyone can argue with performance gains from a faster cpu… ocz is currently having a ram fire sale: OCZ Gold 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1800 (PC3 14400) Dual Channel Kit for $64 after rebate.

if you are into overclocking, getting ddr3 for ddr2 prices seems like a wise choice to me… the latencies that look slow on paper on not an issue at really high frequencies like that.

Charles Says:
July 27th, 2009 at 6:35 pm

Finally some usefull and direct information…

THANK YOU

James Says:
July 27th, 2009 at 8:06 pm

The specific award winning motherboard that you do not recommend us being used as #1 mainboard by serious overclockers around the world, and is known for it’s stability and robust performance. Assuming u have updated the bios and havent screwed up with anything else, yea like every other manufacturer, your board could be faulty. Asus has the lowest ratio of faults to production when it comes to mainboards, amongst all Mboard manufacturers. Discouraging users from buying Asus mainboards because it happened that u belong in the 0,00000000000000000000000000001% is making u look stupid imho again, having said that the specific board has been an epic stable and overclocable piece of gear.

Riyad Kalla Says:
July 28th, 2009 at 9:30 am

James,

If you have links to public information to backup your claims, I’ll absolutely retract my statements — if you don’t, I don’t see how that’s any different then my claim to stay away from that single motherboard.

I also think you meant this for my ASUS-rant post, and not this post. I have a few other data points from friends who had similar upgrade woes with their ASUS boards, but that’s as useless as your percentage… so I chose not to include it.

Let me know when you have that research information handy so I can read it.

makubex Says:
October 5th, 2009 at 1:13 am

solved my dilema, thanks

truth Says:
October 12th, 2009 at 12:56 am

actually….ddr3 1333 is equivalent to ddr2 667. it’s like comparing ddr2 667 to ddr2 800…except the ddr2 667(aka ddr3 1333) performs basically the same as the ddr2 800. considering it performs as well as ddr2 800…if you compared ddr2 667 to ddr3 1333 you would see that the ddr3 wins hand down. the more data you can push at a single time is important, especially since we have processors strong enough to handle all of that data at once now without choking on it. ddr ram sent a little bit of data over a reasonably short period of time. ddr2 pushes double the data at a single time, but takes about twice as long to do it. ddr3 moves data at about 3x the size of ddr1 and also takes 3x as long. so they’re all essentially delivering at the same rates.

ddr3’s only real change over ddr2 is the power consumption. it’s cut by %30 which means it runs cooler and is more stable.

Riyad Kalla Says:
October 15th, 2009 at 7:42 am

Truth,

You’re absolutely right — the bandwidth of DDR3 is much higher than DD2 — this post was written a while ago and for anyone building a performance PC today based on the Core i7 platform, DDR3 is absolutely the way to go — especially after the massive price drop.

Small Business Representation Says:
October 16th, 2009 at 3:32 pm

We are hititng the limit with SATA2 with SSD’s. SATA2 is capped at 3Gb/s not 3GB/s as you stated.

truth Says:
October 16th, 2009 at 5:26 pm

i7’s are still quite pricey…although they do deliver better performance than AMD…but AMD has them beat in pricing. And there are plenty of scenarios where cheaper AMD products perform about the same. For the price of an i7 cpu alone, I instead built an ENTIRE x3 720 machine. That includes the case, power supply, an AM3 mobo, the CPU, and ddr3 1333. Just threw the CD/HD from my old one into the rig and it was good to go.

Many of the i7 massive performance increases over AMD are seen in synthetic benchmarks only, and not in real world scenarios. It’s like the i7 was MADE to specifically max out synthetic benchmarks, which are unrealistic. even if it had 2x the performance it still doesn’t justify itself since it costs more than 2x the price.

Mans Mov Says:
November 18th, 2009 at 9:20 pm

That was a good detailed peace of info. My personal experience revield that a DDR2 800 was faster when I was working with my dell and a friends hp laptops. Both have the same system spec but the ram. One is 4gb ddr2 and one 2gb ddr 3 and that proved to me that more ram can be better than fater ram in many cases.

SteelCity1981 Says:
November 18th, 2009 at 10:04 pm

Ram prices have skyrocketed across the board in the past month. It’s def not a good time to get neither DDR3 or DDR2 ram right now especially if you are on a budget, atleast not until the ram price go back down again.

truth Says:
November 19th, 2009 at 6:29 am

@Mans Mov

what you’re saying goes against common knowledge. DDR3 is faster than DDR2, always. for example, DDR3 1333 is really only DDR3 667 with a different name, and will always give higher performance than DDR2 800.

Another incorrect statement is that your 4gb of DDR2 is faster than 2GB of DDR3. this again, goes against common knowledge. 4 sticks of any type of RAM will deliver slightly worse performance than 2 sticks of the same kind.

Riyad Kalla Says:
November 19th, 2009 at 6:10 pm

Mans,
You’d have to run micro-benchmarks on those two machines to drill down and compare the ram speed… it’s just such an unscientific way to compare the speed of RAM. I really wouldn’t bank on that example.

DDR2 has lower latency than DDR3, but DDR3 has much more bandwidth — so it depends on what you are doing, DDR2 will be faster in some cases (like mathematical operations) and DDR3 will be faster in others (like gaming where GB worth of textures are paged in and out of ram).

Doesn’t really matter anymore though, all recent CPU releases are based on DDR3-platforms.

Riyad Kalla Says:
November 19th, 2009 at 6:10 pm

You can thank Windows 7 and the holiday shopping season for that one.

truth Says:
November 19th, 2009 at 7:24 pm

Unganged Dual Mode DDR3 1333 CAS 9 CR1 (aka ddr667)

Memory Read: 8253 MB/s
Memory Write: 6612 MB/s
Memory Copy: 9676 MB/s
Memory Latency: 54.6

And this is just one of the cheapest DDR3 modules. Others come in CAS 8, 7, and 5.

In everest, there are maybe 1 or 2 DDR2 800, setups that get go over those numbers…and they have a cas of 4, which is less than half the cas of the ddr3.

So in essence, the lowest end DDR3 will be faster than most DDR2, and probably cost half the price or less along with using 30% power hence 30% less heat, hence higher overclocks. You can even bump ddr3 up a whole .4 volts before it will fry.

here’s one results, on a phenom II x3 720 with ddr3 1333 at cas 9, the write speed is 6611MB/s. The second machine is using a phenom II x4 940, with ddr2-800 ram cas 5, the write speed is 5915MB/s. so even with double the cas and unmatched mhz for mhz, the ddr3 still outperforms the ddr2. now imagine that ddr3 1333 module with a cas of 5 or 7, which is readily available.

DDR3 outperforms DDR2 in all areas, the only thing we need is the prices for the lower latency models to come down. but even budget models will outperform ddr2.

Ralph Kradolfer Says:
February 20th, 2008 at 2:24 pm
Thanks a lot for your research, you saved a lot of (my) money
Riyad Kalla Says:
February 20th, 2008 at 2:37 pm
Ralph, I’m glad I could help!
Nelton Says:
March 18th, 2008 at 8:17 am
Dear Riyad,
can you send me your pc specs? Maybe you also did some tests like 3D mark as well?
I’m trying to put a game-pc together for a low price and still good enough to play recent games in good resolutions…
Riyad Kalla Says:
March 18th, 2008 at 8:39 am
Nelton,
The machine turned out being *awesome*, I am really happy with it about 70% because of it’s performance being better than I expected (the 8800 is a hell of a card) and 30% because the price was so damn cheap. I thikn you could build this machine for like $1400 today (NOTE: I didn’t need a monitor, if you need a monitor too it will be closer to $2k or 2100)

* 3.0 Ghz Dual Core E6850
* 4GB 800mhz DDR2 Ram (Corsair)
* BFG 8800 GT (the new 512mb GT that is as fast as the Ultra cards, not the original 256mb one)
* Corsair 620 watt Modular PSU
* 2x Seagate ES.2 750 GB Drives (the enterprise-SATA ones)
* ASUS MAXIMUS FORMULA

All of the hardware is great but I WOULD NOT recommend the ASUS boards anymore. The computer actually hangs on bootup at the memory detection phase (I tried 4GB of Crucial and Corsair, same thing) randomly. It’s a known issue that has not and may not be fixed by ASUS, I’m relaly annoyed by that. Luckily hitting the Bios-wipe button lets me reboot… but that means I can never successfully make any modifications to the BIOS and use the computer… luckily I don’t but it’s a fucked up position ot be in.
jz Says:
March 26th, 2008 at 1:58 am
Great post! But I have to wonder why. 3-4 years back I bought a P4 3.2ghz northwood system with pc3200 dual channel memory which was twice as fast as my old system. All benchmarks were about 2X. Everything was about double my P1.6ghz (oc to 2.1ghz). I knew the ram was about double the speed. The system was responsive and fast. It couldn’t be just because the cpu was changed.

Comparing 800mhz to 1333mhz shows a 1% change in speed. But current computers are about double the speed of my system 3-4 years back with 400mhz ram.

So I now wonder. If I could put a new Q6600 quad OC’d to 3.6ghz with the older 400mhz ram. Would the ram be a bottle neck? Would it slow things down? OR could we simply just put 400mhz ram in new systems and have the same results?

If it’s true that 800mhz is needed today instead of 400mhz, then I would think that there must be a sweet spot for ram for these cpu’s. That’s what my guess is, but I have no way to prove it. If this is true, then it might mean that DDR3 will SOMEDAY be very useful if we get CPU’s that are maybe 1.5X to 2X faster than what we have now. Say maybe 2 years from now. It’s just a guess. But for today, I can see 1333 is a huge waste to build a new system. Thanks for the advise.
jz Says:
March 26th, 2008 at 2:00 am
One other thought. Maybe those benchmarks are not improved much with faster ram. Could there be some other type of applications that would give a 66% speed improvement? Or probably not? If not, it must be that the cpu is the bottleneck somehow. hmmm.
Riyad Kalla Says:
March 26th, 2008 at 6:44 am
jz,
I’m glad the article helped. There are two factors with ram that make it “fast”, and they seem to be mutually exclusive, they are:

* Latency
* Bandwidth

For some reason it seems impossible to have both, you either have 1 or the other. For example, most of these DDR2 sticks of ram have latencies of 2 and 3, but low bandwidth.

DDR3 is ultra-high-bandwidth, but has latencies of 5, 6 and 7. Twice as much latency as the DDR2 pieces.

So the question becomes “what will I see the biggest benefit from today?” and as you correctly stated, a lower latency stick of RAM is going to serve you better with today’s CPUs and peripherals than a higher latency ultra-fat-bandwidth stick of ram.

In a few years where games like Crysis are the norm, and to play a game you have to stream Gigabytes off your 300 MB/sec solid state hard drive, then ultra-high-bandwidth ram that can handle streaming insane amounts of data si going to be necessary and your lower-latency ram won’t make such a difference.

This is sort of the premise of the PS3, it doesn’t have that much ram on it, and *everything* is designed to be considered a stream… streaming audio, graphics, video, etc. but it does it as an insanely high rate of speed.

Honestly I expect whatever Nehalem+1 to really shine and Nehalem+2 to be truely next-next gen where DDR3/4 are “Absolutely necessary”.

So probably like 24/32 months from now. We should have the first Nehalem chips drop at the end of this year, so we’ll get a peak at what will come with the new redesign, but probably be 2010 before our pants are blown off by it.
jean Says:
July 2nd, 2008 at 2:32 am
thanks for this great comment on ddr2-ddr3, idont know too much about memory latency and stuff but wanted to do some research first on ram befre deciding to go for a ddr2 or ddr3 mobo
Riyad Kalla Says:
July 2nd, 2008 at 1:44 pm
Jean,
No problem. I really don’t expect computers to take advantage of DDR3 ram and beyond until Intel releases Nehalem chips at the end of this year and into 2009. I’m sure in 2010 CPUs will be quite a bit faster and using higher bandwidth RAM. 2009 will be a year of CPU speed growth hopefully.
Ratul Says:
July 4th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
The Sweet spot for core 2 duo (memory wise ) is ddr 667. Look in wikipedia for more details.
Mitra Says:
July 7th, 2008 at 10:07 pm
Dude… Try it on the latest Core 2 Quad.
Riyad Kalla Says:
July 7th, 2008 at 10:17 pm
Mitra,
That is what the QX9770 is. Seriously, you aren’t going to start seeing performance differences until these chips are 4Ghz+ I don’t think.

Either way Nehalem is going to be DDR3 only I believe, so we are all going to revamping our systems next year anyway.

But if you want to build a fast budget machine, DDR2-800 all the way.
roy Says:
July 24th, 2008 at 2:23 pm
you chose only benchmarks that don’t need memory bandwidth, so of course you wont see any difference in performance.
Riyad Kalla Says:
July 24th, 2008 at 9:06 pm
Roy,

Please clarify how Video Encoding and Games aren’t memory-bandwidth intensive.

Besides running a straight-up memory bandwidth test, I can’t think of any other *normal* use for a computer that would use more memory bandwidth.

After all the purpose of the article is to point out that with current CPUs on the market, DDR2-800 ram is going to give you the same performance as high-speed DDR3 ram because the other components in the computer just aren’t saturating the existing memory subsystem.

So using a complete synthetic test that would never occur in the real world (synthetic bandwidth test) doesn’t help, because in the end everybody doing normal work with their PC are never going to realize those performance benefits.
vst Says:
August 5th, 2008 at 8:21 am
Thanks for that. I’m going to upgrade my pc which I’m using for music (VST, Ableton and other stuff like this) and I’m going for DDR2. By this time when DDR3 will be good as DDR2 became the technological step forward will be so long that my next upgrade will be to DDR4

Cheers – Matt.
Editor Says:
August 5th, 2008 at 10:23 am
vst,

Glad it helped! And you are right, Nehalem (Intel’s next-gen) will required DDR3 and it’s due out late this year or early next, but with no competition from AMD, Intel is ramping up really slowly.

I have to imagine by the time they refine Nehalem or come out with Nehalem+1 (2 years from now) we will be onto DDR4 just like you said and be dealing with things like integrated CPU/GPUs that Intel is showing off and AMD/ATI are working on.

At that point, with so much happening “on the chip” I could certainly see a need for insanely high bandwidth that DDR4 will offer… but until then, like you said, DDR2 is still serving us just fine.
Alan Says:
August 8th, 2008 at 7:48 am
Editor
I find your article refreshing in comparison to many others revealing why ddr3 is now (as of mid 2008) a good reason to buy when compared to ddr2.
I found that many people asked (in forums) should I buy ddr2 800 or ddr3 1600? Most asked this question because they were wanting to build a new system. I think the answer has always been if you don’t value money then buy and build a ddr3 system. Otherwise look at this cost comparison:

scenario (ddr3)
Memory: 4Gb (2×2gb)ddr3 1600 (cas 6) GSkill – $295
Motherboard: nForce 790i Ultra SLI ddr3 EVGA – $320
CPU: E8500 Wolfdale Intel (3.16Ghz) – $190
Cost: $805
———————————————-
scenario (ddr2)
Memory: 4Gb (2×2gb)ddr2 800 (cas 4) OCZ – $65
Motherboard: nForce 780i Ultra SLI ddr2 EVGA – $220
CPU: Q9450 Yorkfield Intel (2.66Ghz) – $310
Total Cost: $595

Basically if you go with ddr2 system you save at total of $205 and a get a quad core instead of a dual core. Yes you might say the clock speed is slower on the quad and the memory bandwidth is less but with $205 saved you can get a good graphics card (maybe a 9800 GX2) which will boost your gaming experience and beat the other system – plus quad will mean that you overall application/system experience will be better/faster (esp. with Vista 64bit).
Alan Says:
August 8th, 2008 at 7:50 am
Correction your saving is $210
Editor Says:
August 11th, 2008 at 10:13 am
Alan,
You are exactly right. Not only on the savings but also on the folks that tend to drop the big bucks on the DDR3 ram, they just don’t care and want the braging rights.

Hopefully by the end of this year we’ll start to see DDR3 pull away from DDR2, but for the time being I’m just not seeing it.
David Says:
October 9th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
Just the information i needed! Thank’s a lot!
Editor Says:
October 9th, 2008 at 11:40 pm
No problem, glad it helped!
Charles Says:
December 1st, 2008 at 12:51 am
You are tha man! Thanks a lot… work on some keyword phrases like 800 1066 1333 comparison so everyone can find you easily

I had to search for “computer performance ddr2 comparison 800 1066 1333″ hahah everything else was useless…
Riyad Kalla Says:
December 1st, 2008 at 5:41 am
Charles,

Thanks for the heads up, I think you are right, we could do a better job promoting this.

With Nehalem (Core i7) finally out though the landscape needs to be re-evaluated it as those chips do begin to take advantage of the DDR3 memory… so we may have to take another look at memory performance here in the following months for the cutting-edge readers (if I built a new machine today, I’d still do DDR2, it’s so damn cheap)
Ridwan Says:
December 4th, 2008 at 3:26 am
this is really interesting !
they have the DDR3 in the macs and that was one reason for me to buy it but now, i think i’ll continue with the pc operating system …
Roger Says:
December 14th, 2008 at 8:41 am
Dude this is the bomb so glad i found your article but with the I7 out now what do i do? I have been buying piece by piece case coolermaster 830 abs 1100w tagan modular psu but have held off once i saw the i7 coming out with buying the motherboard Should i buy the i7 what are the advantages over that board opposed to the 775 boards? I use the comp mainly for music D.J. Business and am debating using it as a home dvr blu ray player/ media center. so primarily home use but occasional music and video playing
Riyad Kalla Says:
December 14th, 2008 at 9:51 am
Roger,

You are picking a perfect time to go shopping, the prices of RAM in general just dropped through the goddamn floor. 6GB (yes 6!) of nice-ass DDR3 ram is $270 (Newegg).

I couldn’t believe that when I ran across it.

Also I would highly encourage you to look into building the i7 machine. The performance of the Core i7 chips is on average 25% faster across the board than Core 2 was and the 2nd or 3rd from the top fastest quad-core CPUs are pretty damn reasonably priced.

In the past where you got taken to the cleaners with a new platform like i7 was the motherboard and the ram, this time around, RAM is dirt cheap but the motherboards are still a bit more expensive. It’s all a wash in the end.

Say $500 or so for the CPU, $200 for the RAM (4GB), and $300 for the mobo, about $1k for a hell of a machine.

I’d suggest that not because of your use-case (business, DJ, music, movies) but just because it’s such a cheap price tag for an excellent performing machine.

As far as a specific motherboard to get, I no longer have a preference. I used to be a die-hard ASUS fan until my most recent ASUS purchase drove me crazy for months before a firmware fix came out to correct the issue. Now I don’t know if it much matters, I’d probably stick with one of the big-name players, but they are all pretty competitive price-wise.

Let us know what you end up getting.
Tony Says:
December 24th, 2008 at 3:21 am
Good info. Worth reading.

I will soon be building a new core i7 gaming/video editing machine. I have a question though, you said ddr3 takes advantage of this new platform. How is this and would it be a good performance increase from ddr2 800mhz?

I’m very excited as I heard the core i7 helps tremendously for multi-gpu setups.

I’ve also heard of intel releasing a smaller die shink i7 next year so I might wait and hopefully ddr3 prices drop even more. What do you think about that?

Thanks
Riyad Kalla Says:
December 24th, 2008 at 6:21 am
Tony,

The Core i7 platform was engineered for DDR3, so there is no getting around it there. Fortunately the cost of DDR3 has dropped through the floor, so you can pick up plenty of it for cheap now.

Also Intel always does a “tick-tock” yearly release cycle. More specifically, in 2008 they released a new die and next year they will introduce the shrunken version of it with a few enhancements. The year after that they will introduce a new die, and the year after that, the shrunken version of it.

So yes, if you want to wait until Q42009 for your new machine, you can probably grab the die-shrunk version of the Core i7, which I think will be 32nm.
Bryan Says:
January 14th, 2009 at 2:29 pm
Yep, Westmere, the 32mn die-shrink of Nehalem will be out Q4 this year.

I just wanted to say “thank you” for this neat little write-up. I was debating while saving up for my next build (oh, the mind-games we play) whether to get 4 gigs of DDR3 or the 8 gigs of DDR2. Your article makes it clear that 8 gigs of DDR2 is both cheaper and a better use of my money.

I would love to just get a Westmere when they come out, but I think the RAM, board, and chip will still be out of my budget. A quick map:

2008, Nehalem, 45nm —>2009, Westmere, 32nm
2010, Sandy Bridge, 32nm —> 2011 —-> Ivy Bridge, 22nm
2012, Haswell, 22nm —-> ?

~Bryan
Riyad Kalla Says:
January 14th, 2009 at 5:35 pm
Bryan,

Thanks for laying it out, didn’t actually know the shrink was coming this year. Might make for some great Christmas shopping!
DragonFly Says:
February 10th, 2009 at 4:03 am
ive got 4 gig of ddr2 830 in my pc, but its running on 667 speeds, how do i correct this so that it runs on the correct speeds? please someone help!!!
daniel Says:
February 27th, 2009 at 9:56 am
wow thanks heaps! I had heard about this and am building a new pc so.. very helpful info Riyad!
Riyad Kalla Says:
February 27th, 2009 at 10:24 am
Daniel,

Glad we could help. If you are building a new Core i7-based machine though (highly recommended) you’ll be using DDR3 anyway — and luckily the price has fallen quite a bit after everyone got sued in that Classaction lawsuit pertaining to price-fixing… so DDR3 doesn’t carry the price premium it did back when this article was written.

Hope that helps.
Navi Says:
March 22nd, 2009 at 12:17 am
Well If your used to upgrade then wait for DDR3 to become dirt cheap.

Then upgrade from DDR2 to DDR3. Cause by that time the performance difference would be so high that you would start to see the difference without any benchmark.(That’s when 1 shud upgrade, when difference can be seen by your eyes}

Cause whats the point of upgrade to DDR3 when no current processor can saturate the DDR2?

My advice== Go with latest CPU + HIGH Performance Graphic Card+ Shit loads of DDR2 800hz RAM + Minimum 500GB SATA == [for 2 yrs neeed not to upgrade.]

And Please don’t Listen to any1 saying go DDR3 u would be future proof. Cause the guy who use future proof with Computers shudn’t be listened to.
Remember== the motherboard that supports DDR3 now at premium Price will be Dirt cheap by the time DDR3 becomes norm of the day.(And with the same price you would be able to buy Motherboard that would Support DDR4 + Very high speed DDR3(Yes DDR3 is going to get hell a lot faster just like DDR2 did)

So you are not loosing on any front= Performance or Money.
QueSeYo Says:
April 9th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
Thx a lot. I was really freak out about getting another motherboard, because I´m going to change my E2180 (2×2GB 800Mhz) to E6850 (2×2GB 800Mhz) and i was having a bottle neck with my Gf8600GT OC 256MB. But i will check it out when i bring the new 8800GT to my config and see with the old and new config (old cpu – new cpu). I hope my CPU or my Memorys dont bottleneck, is all I care about…
Ciscoed Says:
April 12th, 2009 at 7:06 am
The price of DDR3 has fallen drastically over the past few months. The price difference between DDR3 and DDR2 is comparable. You can check it out at site like newegg.com.
Riyad Kalla Says:
April 13th, 2009 at 7:49 am
No doubt, check out this 6GB bundle of Corsair DDR3 RAM for $100 — insane.

For those of us that don’t want to get an SSD yet and wait for the technology to mature, with Windows 7 (And possibly VIsta to a lesser extent) with the insane amount of cashing the OS provides, 12GB of RAM for $200 should be a really nice middle ground for faster load times.
Leo Says:
April 14th, 2009 at 7:28 pm
great article. it was indeed informative and very pleasant to read. though i still feel hesitant to buy a new notebook. i really want it to be future proof. i can’t jump the gun and pick up a quad extreme dell m4400 notebook. it’s listed that it uses ddr2.. would this be a good buy? a rep said she could configure it to be 64bit but could not make it ddr3..
Bryan Says:
April 14th, 2009 at 8:07 pm
Leo, there is no such thing as “future proof.” It is a misnomer at best. As the saying goes, “Today’s technology is tomorrow’s trash.” I am not trying to be nasty, just pointing out that attempting to buy something that is “future proof” is an exercise in futility. At some point, you just need to buy what is out there, and understand that one day it will be out on the curb.
Leo Says:
April 14th, 2009 at 9:38 pm
i do understand that completely :/ though i would like to pick up something that will be relatively competitive in the future market
Riyad Kalla Says:
April 15th, 2009 at 8:20 am
Leo,

If you want something as “future proof” as you can get in a desktop, get a Core i7-based machine. 920 or so should be fantastic for 3 years or so with 6GB or more of ram (about $100/6gb right now for DDR3 at Newegg).

If you want a “future proof” laptop, that’s a bit harder, because the i7 series chips haven’t been shrunk yet to go into laptops, so you’d be buying last-gen Core 2-based chips.

If you *can* wait, I’d really suggest waiting until next year when Core i7 goes to the mobile platforms along with Windows 7 — I’m not suggesting you have to get Windows 7, I just believe that with the release of W7 later this year, we’ll see a huge push-down in pricing for SSDs in laptops and next year you’d be able to get 4GB+ RAM, SSD and possibly a mobile Core i7-based CPU in a laptop pretty affordibly — that’ll last a long longer for you performance-wise than anything you buy now.

I’m also curious to see how the NVIDIA, AMD and Intel mobile “all in one” platforms pan out in driving down the cost of mobile devices with strong performance characteristics.

You can tell we are “winding down” out of the existing technology stacks and previous-gen hardware because everything is cheap as shit… this usually happens for 6-10 months before new technology stacks drop and dominate the market with the higher-end prices. You can give that time to settle this year and pick something up nice and new Q1 2010 if you can wait.
Leo Says:
April 15th, 2009 at 8:55 am
Great reply riyad! You’re definitely right about future proofing a laptop. I was actually reading about i7 mobile chips possibly being in production by Q4-09.. That’s definitely an incentive to wait for ‘10 and go with a quad 64bit w7 ThinkPad (hopefully with xp downgrade-able).

Though today I can get a great deal which I am debating.. Since it’s not quad core or actually utilizes the supported ddr3 as the i7’s do. Specs are:
ThinkPad T500 ($1698 + Warranty)
-T9600 2.8GHz 1066MHz 6MBL2
-Genuine Windows Vista Business 64 & XP restore DVD -15.4 WXGA TFT, w/ LED Backlight
-ATI Mobility Radeon 3650 with 256MB with Intel Advanced Management Technology
-4 GB PC3-8500 DDR3 SDRAM 1067MHz SODIMM Memory)
-320 GB Hard Disk Drive, 7200rpm ect++

Such an overwhelming decision.. I could wait to caress a newly built notebook but sighhh! My main use in the notebook will be for audio production (ableton live 8, reason4, native instruments komplete 5). Never really game.. Other than that, movie viewing/visualizers, basic word processing, photoshopping, internetting/streaming, and spread sheet processing on the side.

any more help will be appreciated to the max!
Riyad Kalla Says:
April 15th, 2009 at 10:37 am
Leo,

Ha! I’ve been watching the same Lenovo coupons — did you see that 20% off one that came out today for the X-series? (I love the X301).

I really do like Lenovos, I’ve had my T60 for about 2.5 years now and it still performs fine for what I use it for.

I don’t know that much about the memory requirements for audio processing, but it looks like that machine would handle that without much of a problem… I’m all hung up on getting a new laptop until I can get a SSD affordibly in one… with a desktop you can just put in so much memory that an SSD isn’t required, with a laptop, it’s the most common bottleneck I”ve run into (software like Java IDEs) — the performance boost in a laptop from an SSD is night and day, I just don’t think that $510 Lenovo wants for the 128gb Samsung is worth it just yet (Especially with it being the new hotness in the computer market).

Do you really need the laptop now, in which case, go for it. That’s a great buy… or do you just really *want* the new laptop now?

I sort of feel like Bryan does — if you need the computer, buy it without much consternation, I’m sure it will work great even if you upgrade it with an SSD next year and throw Windows 7 on it or something.

I really don’t recall a night-and-day difference in performance between Intel platforms when it was actually placed into a new machine (P4 to Core 1, Core 1 to Core 2, etc.), so I don’t think you’ll hate yourself if you get a smoking deal now and just live with it for a few years.

BTW, I think you can save like $400 if you get the 2.53ghz CPU instead of the 2.8 — I haven’t looked in a few weeks, but I thought I remember the price-gap pretty big, if you could get that T500 with a slower CPU and an SSD, I think you’d be happy as a clam.

(but then again, I don’t know anything about audio processing, not such how much that extra 300mhz is helping you)
Riyad Kalla Says:
April 15th, 2009 at 10:48 am
Leo,

Here’s the coupon I was talking about, 2-days only:
======================================

Lenovo 2 day sale – 20% off Thinkpad X and more, Apr 15

Lenovo offers 15% – 20% off on select notebooks for 4/15 – 4/16 only.

Use eCoupon “USPSTPATSSALE” in cart.

* 20% off ThinkPad X Notebooks
* 20% off ThinkPad X Tablet
* 20% off ThinkPad W Series laptops
* 15% off – ThinkPad T, SL and R Series laptops
* 20% off accessories (monitors excluded)
Leo Says:
April 15th, 2009 at 12:54 pm
Again! Thanks for the quick response

I appreciate you showing me the codes so I don’t have to customize my book through the spring deal page. I went to see what kind of price I could get on a w700 and I come to check out and try the code, but it states that it is not valid. Maybe it was automatically applied. I wish they offered the w500 with a quad core.. I would be all over that..

The x301 is a beauty. I do need a lot more power though. Audio processing is very meticulous as latency and CPU load is very crucial. This is why I want to max out my performance. I would rather spend the extra money on the CPU and upgrade to a MLC SSD in the future as prices drop and storage increases!

I sort of WANT and NEED a laptop now.. Haha I guess it’s a little bit of both. My current specs are still stuck in 06..

Gateway Laptop – MX6446 – about 2.5 years old
CPU – AMD Turion 64 MK-36 (single core 1.99gHz)
Ram – 2GB (upgraded)
HDD – 100GB 7200rpm (upgraded) ultra-ata (lol sad)
GPU – ATI Radeon Xpress 1150 (integrated) shared 128 mb
OS – XP Pro 32bit SP3

So sad and so combobulated. I want to be a happy clam, lol
Leo Says:
April 15th, 2009 at 1:22 pm
discombobulated**
Riyad Kalla Says:
April 15th, 2009 at 9:12 pm
Leo, I know the feeling. I guess if I were in your shoes I’d go dig up some benchmarks on the AMD MK-36 compared to the Intel T9600 with processor intensive tasks (like WinRAR, video encoding, LAME encoding, etc.) and see if the gap is a 100% or more jump in performance.

That should give you a good feel for what kind of awesome the upgrade will have in store for you or if you should wait for the Core i7 and hobble along a bit longer.

This might sorta help, but then again I don’t know what tests “CPU Mark” runs to determine a score: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup.php?cpu=AMD+Turion+64+Mobile+MK-36
Kevin Says:
April 16th, 2009 at 2:41 am
… Are you really that stupid?

The video encoding doesn’t depend on Ram. It depends mostly on the CPU thus rendering the Ram pretty useless.

Games=Cpu and Gpu Mostly.

Other than that, you are right. DDR3 consumes less power and only has a 10-15% boost
Riyad Kalla Says:
April 16th, 2009 at 9:13 am
Kevin, I need a mailing address for you so I can send you a giant “I Won at the Internet” trophy I have sitting here for you.
Riyad Kalla Says:
April 16th, 2009 at 2:59 pm
Leo,

Just saw this on Anandtech today, some more information about Intel’s 32nm Core i7 chips that are gonna get a core-bump on desktop and shrunk down for Notebooks.
Leo Says:
April 16th, 2009 at 3:20 pm
Riyad, I checked out that “CPU MARK” link for my CPU and compared it to the T9600. T9600 basically tripled the MK-36 score! The QX9300 easily quadrupled my puny Turion.

“CPU tests Mathematical operations, compression, encryption, SSE…”

I will definitely be happy if I bought a T500 with a T9600 or a W700 with a QX9300 today. BUT if I wait longer, I’ll be able to save more money and sport around a 32nm Duo/Quad in a 15″ Lenovo, (hopefully). 17″ is a bit big for my taste and preference.

Also THANKS for the informative link. I’ve found more info on the same topics:

http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20090326PD208.html

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/index.cfm?NewsID=113156

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Montevina-Plus-Processors-to-Enable-Affordable-Ultraportables-108071.shtml

http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2009/02/intel_westmere_32nm_integrates_graphics_in_the_cpu.html

http://www.intel.com/corporate/pressroom/emea/deu/cebit/pdfs/CeBIT_Client_Tech_Briefing.pdf

http://www.electronista.com/articles/09/03/20/intel.2ghz.atom.in.april/

Kevin, seriously, why do you have to be a douche? Can’t you get along and offer positive criticism?
Bryan Says:
April 16th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
Negativity = Not so helpful.

Positive, Well-Intentioned Advice = Perhaps helpful.
danimal Says:
May 9th, 2009 at 1:51 pm
kevin is confused, and there are some points in this article that were not addressed; specifically, the effects of overclocking the cpu.

while it’s true that fast ddr2 provides plenty of bandwidth, it also limits your overclocking ability… with ddr3, if you can get the 1:2 multiplier that you couldn’t get with ddr2, you’ll be able to run the fsb at 500mhz, depending on the cpu… which translates into a substantial increase in cpu frequency, or to put it another way, the ability to encode video and such in a shorter period of time.

i don’t think that anyone can argue with performance gains from a faster cpu… ocz is currently having a ram fire sale: OCZ Gold 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1800 (PC3 14400) Dual Channel Kit for $64 after rebate.

if you are into overclocking, getting ddr3 for ddr2 prices seems like a wise choice to me… the latencies that look slow on paper on not an issue at really high frequencies like that.
Charles Says:
July 27th, 2009 at 6:35 pm
Finally some usefull and direct information…

THANK YOU
James Says:
July 27th, 2009 at 8:06 pm
The specific award winning motherboard that you do not recommend us being used as #1 mainboard by serious overclockers around the world, and is known for it’s stability and robust performance. Assuming u have updated the bios and havent screwed up with anything else, yea like every other manufacturer, your board could be faulty. Asus has the lowest ratio of faults to production when it comes to mainboards, amongst all Mboard manufacturers. Discouraging users from buying Asus mainboards because it happened that u belong in the 0,00000000000000000000000000001% is making u look stupid imho again, having said that the specific board has been an epic stable and overclocable piece of gear.
Riyad Kalla Says:
July 28th, 2009 at 9:30 am
James,

If you have links to public information to backup your claims, I’ll absolutely retract my statements — if you don’t, I don’t see how that’s any different then my claim to stay away from that single motherboard.

I also think you meant this for my ASUS-rant post, and not this post. I have a few other data points from friends who had similar upgrade woes with their ASUS boards, but that’s as useless as your percentage… so I chose not to include it.

Let me know when you have that research information handy so I can read it.
makubex Says:
October 5th, 2009 at 1:13 am
solved my dilema, thanks
truth Says:
October 12th, 2009 at 12:56 am
actually….ddr3 1333 is equivalent to ddr2 667. it’s like comparing ddr2 667 to ddr2 800…except the ddr2 667(aka ddr3 1333) performs basically the same as the ddr2 800. considering it performs as well as ddr2 800…if you compared ddr2 667 to ddr3 1333 you would see that the ddr3 wins hand down. the more data you can push at a single time is important, especially since we have processors strong enough to handle all of that data at once now without choking on it. ddr ram sent a little bit of data over a reasonably short period of time. ddr2 pushes double the data at a single time, but takes about twice as long to do it. ddr3 moves data at about 3x the size of ddr1 and also takes 3x as long. so they’re all essentially delivering at the same rates.

ddr3’s only real change over ddr2 is the power consumption. it’s cut by %30 which means it runs cooler and is more stable.
Riyad Kalla Says:
October 15th, 2009 at 7:42 am
Truth,

You’re absolutely right — the bandwidth of DDR3 is much higher than DD2 — this post was written a while ago and for anyone building a performance PC today based on the Core i7 platform, DDR3 is absolutely the way to go — especially after the massive price drop.
Small Business Representation Says:
October 16th, 2009 at 3:32 pm
We are hititng the limit with SATA2 with SSD’s. SATA2 is capped at 3Gb/s not 3GB/s as you stated.
truth Says:
October 16th, 2009 at 5:26 pm
i7’s are still quite pricey…although they do deliver better performance than AMD…but AMD has them beat in pricing. And there are plenty of scenarios where cheaper AMD products perform about the same. For the price of an i7 cpu alone, I instead built an ENTIRE x3 720 machine. That includes the case, power supply, an AM3 mobo, the CPU, and ddr3 1333. Just threw the CD/HD from my old one into the rig and it was good to go.

Many of the i7 massive performance increases over AMD are seen in synthetic benchmarks only, and not in real world scenarios. It’s like the i7 was MADE to specifically max out synthetic benchmarks, which are unrealistic. even if it had 2x the performance it still doesn’t justify itself since it costs more than 2x the price.
Mans Mov Says:
November 18th, 2009 at 9:20 pm
That was a good detailed peace of info. My personal experience revield that a DDR2 800 was faster when I was working with my dell and a friends hp laptops. Both have the same system spec but the ram. One is 4gb ddr2 and one 2gb ddr 3 and that proved to me that more ram can be better than fater ram in many cases.
SteelCity1981 Says:
November 18th, 2009 at 10:04 pm
Ram prices have skyrocketed across the board in the past month. It’s def not a good time to get neither DDR3 or DDR2 ram right now especially if you are on a budget, atleast not until the ram price go back down again.
truth Says:
November 19th, 2009 at 6:29 am
@Mans Mov

what you’re saying goes against common knowledge. DDR3 is faster than DDR2, always. for example, DDR3 1333 is really only DDR3 667 with a different name, and will always give higher performance than DDR2 800.

Another incorrect statement is that your 4gb of DDR2 is faster than 2GB of DDR3. this again, goes against common knowledge. 4 sticks of any type of RAM will deliver slightly worse performance than 2 sticks of the same kind.
Riyad Kalla Says:
November 19th, 2009 at 6:10 pm
Mans,
You’d have to run micro-benchmarks on those two machines to drill down and compare the ram speed… it’s just such an unscientific way to compare the speed of RAM. I really wouldn’t bank on that example.

DDR2 has lower latency than DDR3, but DDR3 has much more bandwidth — so it depends on what you are doing, DDR2 will be faster in some cases (like mathematical operations) and DDR3 will be faster in others (like gaming where GB worth of textures are paged in and out of ram).

Doesn’t really matter anymore though, all recent CPU releases are based on DDR3-platforms.
Riyad Kalla Says:
November 19th, 2009 at 6:10 pm
You can thank Windows 7 and the holiday shopping season for that one.
truth Says:
November 19th, 2009 at 7:24 pm
Unganged Dual Mode DDR3 1333 CAS 9 CR1 (aka ddr667)

Memory Read: 8253 MB/s
Memory Write: 6612 MB/s
Memory Copy: 9676 MB/s
Memory Latency: 54.6

And this is just one of the cheapest DDR3 modules. Others come in CAS 8, 7, and 5.

In everest, there are maybe 1 or 2 DDR2 800, setups that get go over those numbers…and they have a cas of 4, which is less than half the cas of the ddr3.

So in essence, the lowest end DDR3 will be faster than most DDR2, and probably cost half the price or less along with using 30% power hence 30% less heat, hence higher overclocks. You can even bump ddr3 up a whole .4 volts before it will fry.

here’s one results, on a phenom II x3 720 with ddr3 1333 at cas 9, the write speed is 6611MB/s. The second machine is using a phenom II x4 940, with ddr2-800 ram cas 5, the write speed is 5915MB/s. so even with double the cas and unmatched mhz for mhz, the ddr3 still outperforms the ddr2. now imagine that ddr3 1333 module with a cas of 5 or 7, which is readily available.

DDR3 outperforms DDR2 in all areas, the only thing we need is the prices for the lower latency models to come down. but even budget models will outperform ddr2.

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