Introduction

We have been prattling on about DDR3 and the Intel platform for some time now. It has only been a few months since DDR3 hit the shore, but it's already starting to be produced in mass, especially by the enthusiast companies such as OCZ, Micron, Mushkin, Corsair, Geil and so on.

DDR3 is the next logical step for the Intel Core 2 platform as its ability to deliver extreme bandwidths beyond that of the current DDR2 line is remarkable. This is going to be the trump card Intel will push for the 1333MHz FSB CPU, especially with the Core 2 Quad series of CPU which requires as much bandwidth and memory speed as it can get, this due to die-A needing to go back along the FSB and into main memory to communicate with die-B; the faster this can be done, the better off Intel will be.

So far there is only one major player in the DDR3 arena, that being Intel. Only the Intel 3 series chipsets have support for DDR3 memory, though we hope to see an nForce 6 or 7 series chipset soon with support for DDR3 and overclocking, as the potential for overclocking has greatly increased.

DDR3 uses a lower signal voltage of 1.5v rather than the usual 1.8v of DDR2 memory, an 8-way buffer is also used rather than the 4-way in DDR2, this allowing for the increased speed of the memory without having to increase the cell frequency.

Today we have three DDR3 memory kits on test; OCZ's DDR3-1333MHz, Geil's DDR3-1066MHz and Kingston's DDR3-1375MHz.