Summary And Conclusions: Small Benefits From Faster Clocks

Synthetic benchmarks make it easy to distinguish among various DDR2 clock rates.

But even if the clock rates that the AData and Corsair DIMMs attained are technically impressive, the performance results are far from awe-inspiring.

By and large, we are convinced that the step from DDR-533 to DDR2-667 makes sense when timing settings remain comfortably fast (Corsair). But DDR2-800 confers only minimal additional performance gains, and at DDR2-1066 the further reduction in timing settings provides little room for improvement. The price increases for these faster chips are proportionately much higher than the performance benefits they deliver.

For business applications, installing faster DDR2 DIMMs isn't cost justifiable, and even gung-ho gamers will find that the extra money pays better dividends if invested in a high-end graphics card. Either way, we recommend a big name vendor, because they invest more in the testing and validation of new products.