Finding the Best Latency Settings for DDR2

DDR2 SDRAM Timings Under Investigation

by Yaroslav Lyssenko

[ 04/24/2005 | 08:25 AM ]

TweakTown has posted an article containing an investigation of the best latency settings for DDR2 memory. The author tries to find out what set of memory timings is the best choice for ensuring higher performance on Intel Pentium 4 platform. The investigation was made with OCZ’s DDR2 memory module kit installed on the Intel 925XE core-logic-based ASUS P5AD2-E Premium mainboard.

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“We can see from our test results that it is pretty clear the Intel Pentium 4 is not a latency craver, as its design simply precludes any need for extremely low latencies which the AMD Athlon craves. It is however, a bandwidth hog. DDR-2’s higher latency over DDR doesn’t make it such a bad choice now that speeds are starting to reach 667MHz and above which is much quicker than the speeds which DDR-2 was first released at 533MHz. DDR-2 is now starting to show its colours, and with Dual Core, PCI-Express now starting to take a chunk of the bandwidth, its certainly a good thing to see that bandwidth is now in abundance. When it comes to setting up your system (overclocked or not), we can see that for the Pentium 4 platform series, higher bandwidth is more important than tighter timings when it comes to overall performance. Tight timings are good but are far from crucial for the Pentium 4 – keep this in mind when it comes to buying DDR-2, especially expensive DDR-2,” concludes TweakTown.

• TweakTown: DDR-2 Memory Investigation Guide - Making Sense of Memory Settings.