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AMD Phenom II X4 810: DDR3 vs. DDR2 |
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Written by Fedja Drndarski
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Monday, 09 February 2009 |
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Page 2 of 7
DDR3: Is It Worth It?
This question bugs most (future) owners of this platform. In our test lab we used all our benchmarks that are memory sensitive. We can conclude that gains in performances are not that big. However in some situations AM3 platform has surprised us. In 3D benchmarks benefits of having DDR3 memory are obvious. You shouldn’t expect miracles but gains in performances can be up to 5% compared to AM2+ with DDR2 on tighter latencies. There were also situations where Gigabyte motherboard performed worse than DFI LanParty DK790FXB. Memory bandwidth test in SiSoft Sandra showed for 50% worse results than in case of DDR2 memory. This is, most probably, consequence of un-optimized BIOS. On the other side access times (memory latencies) are in average better for 10% which is good indicator of performance levels that can be expected in the near future. AM2 platform with DDR2 667 compared to DDR1 on 939 brought higher latencies and almost the same bandwidth. AM3 brings lower latencies, which is nice, and for better bandwidth we should wait for better BIOS and motherboards from other manufacturers. If we take into account that price for tested Kingston Value RAM DDR3 1333 modules is for 50% higher than price of (similar) Kingston HyperX DDR2 1066 and performance gains in Crysis and Crysis Warhead is only 5%, than we suggest you to wait for another price drop for DDR3 modules.
Overclocking
We managed to overclock Phenom II 810 on default voltage at 3.4GHz, but we could achieve better results if we had BIOS that wasn’t in beta version. With locked Phenom CPUs options for voltage weren’t accessible: BIOS blocked access to that menu. When we tried with Phenom II X2 720 Black Edition with unlocked multiplicator and VID (Voltage IDentifier) we achieved, easily, 3.6GHz with nortbridge on 2.6GHz. Stable frequency for DDR3 memory was 1400MHz with CL6 6-6-18 1T latencies, which is maximum that we could expect from Kingston Value RAM modules. For 1600MHz and higher values of memory frequency, better and pricier modules are needed. Interesting details is the fact that we achieved 1T command rate with DDR3 without any problems as contrast to DDR2 modules. Maximum voltage that Gigabyte motherboard allowed us to use for DDR3 modules was 2V and this more than enough for most modules that can be bought.
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Processors 
