Today we look at why DDR3 memory has provided us with no noticeable performance gains over existing DDR2 memory. The reasoning is quite simple really and it has to do with the Core 2 Duo processors lack of need for memory faster than 800MHz. The article investigates this in a little more detail and looks to the future, when DDR3 will become an important memory standard.
Over the past few months we have published quite a few DDR2 memory related articles that looked at how timings, frequency and capacity influence the performance of Intel’s Core 2 Duo processors. The results did not really surprise us, though many of the readers did seem shocked by our findings. First of all memory timings (latency) make very little difference, as CAS 3-3-3-8 T1 delivered just 5% more memory bandwidth at 800MHz when compared to CAS6-6-6-18 T2 timings. In almost all games this made near no difference, particularly at higher resolutions such as 1920x1200. So memory timings are somewhat irrelevant for Core 2 Duo systems then.
http://www.legionhardware.com/document.php?id=674
