"When faced with a limited budget but a desire to have the latest and greatest technology, it is usually has to cut corners"
should be "one usually has to cut corners"

Reply

page 2:

"...one of the widely used setups in use today." Maybe you like the extra words but you could drop the words "in use" and still be making the same point.


"The memory features average latencies at DDR2-667 but was able to perform at lower latencies in our testing while costing around $70 for a 1GB kit.

{transcend-ddr2.html}" <--- supposed to be a link or image?


Reply

Blame the sleepy editor. :|

The Transcend table was present, but the supported RAM speeds table was not. I fixed the error, as well as the other two grammar issues you pointed out. Thanks!

Reply

hehe no problem. =)

Reply

I am surprised how little advantage DDR2 has over DDR memory. Very interesting. Was the difference greater from SDR to DDR? I forget.

Reply

In some instances DDR was quite a bit faster than SDR. I think it gave about a 10% performance boost on average, and up to 20% in a few special cases. It's also worth noting that the ASRock does offer lower performance than other high-end DDR2 boards, but the price tradeoff makes it justifiable.

Reply

DDR was quite a bit faster than DDR - just the way it is now with DDR2 and SDR. However, in the budget side of the equation, the processors weren't starved enough for bandwidth, so the difference was very small.
I wonder what the results would have been if a faster processor would have been used.

Oh, and maybe the chipset/BIOS isn't optimized for DDR2 performance (as for DDR, all the performance that could have been squeezed in about three-four years of building chipsets was already there).

Reply

Did you mean DDR was quite a bit faster than SDR and now with DDR2 with DDR?

Reply

Yep, I feel stoopid :)
Anyway, the idea is that a change in memory patterns (SDR to DDR, SDR to RDRAM, DDR to DDR2) is a battle between old very optimised technology, and new, unproven yet technology. The small difference in speed can be explained that "current" technology in processors is built for best performance with current memory - a new memory type often is not optimised for the memory access needed by the processor.

As an example, RDRAM was (just a tad) slower on Pentium !!! (compared to high performance SDRAM). Pentium4, which was bandwidth starved with single channel SDRAM, was much faster with RDRAM (dual channel though) - as much as a P4 2000 (Willamette) with SDRAM was equal to a P4 1600 with RDRAM. As speed increased, needed bandwidth increased too - but the move to dual channel DDR was the final nail in the coffin of RDRAM on PC.
The other example - Athlon64 is not bandwidth starved on current (dual channel DDR400) memory, so doubling memory bandwidth brought no advantage. The decrease in latency was not enough to bring extra performance.
The situation is mostly similar with Core2Duo - more memory bandwidth brings little advantage.

This might change for quad-core processors, as they could use twice the memory bandwidth we see now - or on the Athlon side with a more aggressive prefetching algorithm (which will eat bandwidth bringing data that seem to be useful in the near future).

Reply

Well, if you go by pure synthetic benchmarks, DDR is 5x faster than SDRAM most of the time. Actual application performance, may be different.

Reply