SUMMARY: In our latest guide we investigate DDR-2 memory on the Intel Pentium 4 platform and the differences between high bandwidth and timings to figure out which offers the best system performance. What is better - higher clock speed or super tight timings? We discuss the reasons why one is better than the other and prove our claims through a range of different system configuration benchmarks.
Memory is one of the hottest growing components on the overclockers list of most important requirements. A good CPU is one thing and cooling is another but if your memory can’t handle the pace, then you’re simply throwing money away.
DDR-2 has now started its mass run on the Intel market, with rumours that AMD will start looking at DDR-2 on the Athlon 64 sometime in the near future - but one thing remains… how good is it? We have seen in the past that DDR memory running at lower latencies can do a better job then memory running at higher clock speeds with higher latencies. Though this is the general rule for the AMD Athlon XP and Athlon 64 CPU, due to a much more ridged memory controller (especially on the Athlon 64 with the on CPU memory controller), this isn’t as much the case when it comes to the Intel camp. Intel Pentium 4 with its longer pipeline tends to respond better to higher bandwidth than lower latencies, at least this proved true 90% of the time with DDR.
As we mentioned earlier, DDR-2 is a different story, as some of the key developments have changed, and thus changed the overall bandwidth and latencies of the memory and how does this affect the memory performance of the Pentium 4 based DDR-2 systems? Today we hope to answer this
Today we are putting OCZ’s DDR-2 memory onto one of the best overclocking boards available today, the Intel 925XE ASUS P5AD2-E Premium to see just how far DDR-2 can go and what the overall performance pluses and minuses are of the different configurations such as clock speed vs. latency, running memory 1:1 and not and so on.
If you’re interested about how to setup your new DDR-2 based system properly when it comes to memory, read on and we’ll show you as proved by a bunch of benchmark comparisons.
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