X-bit labs

DDR3-1600 SDRAM: Technological Breakthrough or Marketing Trick? (page 6)

Category: Memory

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 08/21/2007 | 06:54 PM ]

Performance: DDR3-1600 vs. DDR2

Memory Subsystem Synthetic Benchmarks

First of all let’s check out the practical bandwidth and latency of the new DDR3 SDRAM. For our tests we chose Everest Ultimate Edition 4.00 utility.

During reading from the memory DDR2-1200 showed the maximum bandwidth. Even DDR3-1600 with 1/3 higher theoretical speed, cannot outperform the previous generation overclocker memory modules. Looks like the high latencies of DDr3 SDRAM played a bad joke on it. However, DDR2-1000 with the most aggressive timings of 4-4-4-12 reads from the memory slower than DDR3-1600 and than DDR3-1333 with 5-7-5-15 timings.

Writing into memory is limited by the processor bus bandwidth that is why the results of the second Everest test cannot give us any new food for thought.

During file copying within the memory subsystem latency is of utmost importance. That is why the highest score in this test belongs to DDR2-1200 with 5-5-5-15 timings, while DDR3-1333 with 5-7-5-15 timings and DDR2-1000 with 4-4-4-12 timings are in the second place. DDR3 modules with CAS Latency 7 perform much worse here.

The practical latency measurements show that high-speed DDR2 memory outperforms even overclocker DDR3 SDRAM. In other words, today’s race between DDR2 and DDR3 again turns into “bandwidth against latency” competition.

Now let’s check out the results of complex benchmarks and real applications