X-bit labs

DDR2 vs. DDR: Revenge Gained (page 6)

Category: Memory

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 12/17/2004 | 01:46 PM ]

Now let’s see how the different memory types behave in real applications:

The era of DDR SDRAM is coming to its end. The latency of DDR2 SDRAM is approaching that of DDR SDRAM, so the results of the systems with the new memory look quite pleasing now. In fact, DDR2-533 with 3-3-3 timings brings the performance i925/i915-based systems one level up. Computers with Intel’s new chipsets have a higher performance than i875/i865-based systems – you only have to use memory with aggressive timings!

The new DDR533 SDRAM with aggressive 2.5-3-3 latencies cannot become a savior for the i865/i875 chipsets, although it does add some more speed to them.

As we mentioned above, the performance of DDR2-based systems is more sensitive to a lower latency than to a higher frequency. So, we get practically nothing from using DDR2-600 SDRAM with the i925/i915 chipsets.

Thus, DDR2-533 SDRAM with timings below 3-3-3 is the memory that ensures the maximum performance in computer systems for Intel’s CPUs. And the lower these timings, the higher the performance is.