8GB 1066 DDR2 or 4GB 2000 DD3?

I really want to stay with windows XPpro so i am wanting to get 4GB of DD3-2000. However if debating on rather to use my copy of vista ultimate and dual boot and just buy 8GB of DDR2. What do you guys think? Is the memory timing that much faster to make it worth it for games?

^+1

The latencies of DDR3 are so high that there isn't any difference between it and high quality DDR2, although there is a big difference in price.

If it were me it would depend if I was going to upgrade to Nehalem anytime soon. Otherwise I would agree with everyone here.

While Nehalem comes at end of this year or beginning of next, it's only the "extreme" version that Intel releases first. Those cost a fortune. You'll have to wait almost a year for mainstream versions to hit the market. Some people run on old machines that just don't cut it anymore, and can't wait so long.

you must understand how most of the ram is used

generally even the fastest ddr3 ram and ddr or ddr2 ram have almost the same amount of time to access the data if processor asks data from positions in the ram which are not continuous

the difference in them is the sequential bandwidth.if processor asks the data which are side and side as an array then the speed is very high and there comes the bandwidth of the ram

suppose processor asks for memory in 10th ,99 th, 57 th postion then then for every time the data comes after the latency

if we ask as data from 34th to 500th position into cache
then the only time the latency occurs is during the fetch of the first bit of data and from there it comes at the speed of ram maximum bandwidth

so here the ram speed matters

you must also know that having ram speed more than the fsb(front side bus) do not gain anything

in most of the cases the difference in performance of programs using different speeds is not that much because they mostly access data randomly from various locations or the time(in this case low latency ram has a lot of advantage) or computation in cache is very high when compared to memory writing and reading

but the hardware, compilers , programs ... are designed to make use of memory bandwidth(to fetch memory in continuous mode )

the thing which happens is that when processor does not find the available data in its cache then it loads some amount (few kilo bytes)of continuous data which comes from ram and copied into cache then the data is modified as the program suggests and generally written into some other position in ram as the program has to do , in generally writing occurs sequential


Intel ,amd and programmers know that ram is slow in random access but in sequential access it rocks hence programmers make programs for using sequential fetch

for most of the games memory speed can increase fps(when physics in games occurs like explosions and particles fl away and gravity ...)

you just need a good gpu and faster processor to get good fps


note: more ram means more good gaming (if ram speed is near to fsb, else make a dual channel with ram)

why so many threads about ddr 3 vs ddr2.... ddr3 isn't worth it until nehalem.... also 8gb of ddr 2 is equal to 8 gbs of ddr3.... ddr3 does virtually double the limit of space... a GB is stll a GB.... lke if you run 2 GB in vista w/ ddr2 and then switch to 1 GB ddr3.... you'll have MUCH worse performance.... its only 1 GB it can't make up for the fact that it has less space just because its slightly faster

1. I do hope you have a 64bit OS

2. If getting 8GB reduce your pagefile size to 2-3GB.

^True. It depends on what programs you are running. Some programs WILL crash if the pagefile is too small.

As a matter of interest, what benefit do you get if you reduce your page file, or even eliminate it in Vista-64 and 8gb? Saving a few gb of hard drive space does not seem to be worth much to me. Are there other benefits?

No. Some programs look for the pagefile specifically. I admit a program like this is rare but I have run across programs like this.

I would think that a program that forces pages to/from the pagefile is aware of how much ram it has to work with, and is trying to manage some limitation in the amount of ram it has to work with. With 8gb, it should not have to do this often.