Would you go down the DDR2 or DDR3 route?

[sir-les-mp]

Im in the same boat as you im also looking at an AMD Pii 720BE and ive decided to go for a DDR3 mobo.
As i dont upgrade regularly i feel by going for the DDR3 mobo in a year or 2 all i should need to bring my pc back up to spec should be a new cpu and probably a video card
Also like you i would like an AM3 mobo with SLi but at present there are none out in the market.
and ive not seen any details of any possible offerings in the future yet.

 

[HangTime]

I'm inclined to agree with JeremyW; "future proofing" can be a false economy because often by the time you want to be seeing the benefit from it (a couple of years down the line), prices have fallen so much on that type of kit that you could have just replaced anything anyway. Or sometimes even worse, your kit may have been superceded (take S754 for example).

To illustrate, it might actually cost more to buy quality DDR3 ram now, than it would to buy DDR2 ram now, and then a basic mobo plus DDR3 RAM in a year's time!

Obviously there are exceptions in terms of cases where I would want to avoid getting stuck with old tech (say buying an AGP mobo when PCI-E was starting to take over) but in general I wouldn't want to pay too much of a premium for so-called future proofing, which is a gamble. Heck, if you're not planning on changing anything for a couple of years, then you won't buying any more RAM so does it really matter if it's DDR2 or DDR3?

On the plus side, low end DDR3 is starting to become more affordable (Crucial have a 6GB triple channel kit for £84)