I currently have an E8400 running on 4GB (4x1GB) DDR2 6400 but my motherboard also has DDR3 slots. Roughly how much of a performance increase could I expect if i were to replace my DDR2 6400 with DDR3 10666, timing difference being negligible?
DDR2 to DDR3?
- Thread starter Azuse05
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Not a huge amount.
I went from an IP35-PRO (Q6600, 4GB PC2-8500) to an IX38BT (Q6600, 4GB PC3-10666) and haven't noticed much of an increase in memory throughput.
I'd also imagine that with it being a DDR2/DDR3 board it's probably not a particularly great board to begin with.
I went from an IP35-PRO (Q6600, 4GB PC2-8500) to an IX38BT (Q6600, 4GB PC3-10666) and haven't noticed much of an increase in memory throughput.
I'd also imagine that with it being a DDR2/DDR3 board it's probably not a particularly great board to begin with.
AnandTech had this article a few years ago: http://anandtech.com/memory/showdoc.aspx?i=2989&p=7
From which the conclusion seems to be "there's a gain, but it's only a couple of %"
XBit Labs did a similar article around the same time: http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/memory/display/ddr3.html
Which pretty much concluded that in DDR2 1066 vs DDR3 1333, there's so little to be gained that it isn't worthwhile.
Although we seem to be rapidly approaching a point where DDR3 will end up cheaper than DDR2 due to supply and demand
From which the conclusion seems to be "there's a gain, but it's only a couple of %"
XBit Labs did a similar article around the same time: http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/memory/display/ddr3.html
Which pretty much concluded that in DDR2 1066 vs DDR3 1333, there's so little to be gained that it isn't worthwhile.
Although we seem to be rapidly approaching a point where DDR3 will end up cheaper than DDR2 due to supply and demand
Man of Honour
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The actual bottleneck is the memory controller. In this case, it would be like putting a different sized wheel and tire combination on a car and where the new tires have a higher speed rating. The tires are rated faster but the car will not go any faster.
Ive been saying this for months. On Socket LGA775 the frontside bus between the memory controller and CPU has the biggest bandwidth limitation, not the memory chips, so fast ram is optimal when overclocking, but even then only as far as the cpu overclock... Tighter timings help more in my opinion on LGA775.
If you can get the memory so fast its twice as fast as the frontside bus, then you may see enough improvement in latency on small (64bit or less) transfers, but even so Core processors are extremely good at filling cache well in advance, so outside synthetic benchys the advantages of faster ram then your overclock are very low.
i5/i7 the higher overclock achieveable on the ondie memory controller the higher the usable ram bandwidth.
Caporegime
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You can use one of the other, not both together.
