A mate of mine decided a DDR3 motherboard would be the best option when replacing his old one ready for his q6600 he bought a 2GB strip of Corsair 1333MHz and I remember it setting him back about £40. I had a 2GB strip of PNY 5-5-5-18 CR2 800MHz DDR2 which I paid £15 for. We both achieved the same Windows performance index score (on 7) of 5.5 we thought this was down to large gaps between different scores. More recently I've added another 2GB strip of the same PNY stuff and OCed to 829MHz and my score has jumped to 7.1. On further investigation my RAM is substantially faster in Everest as well. why are my scores so much higher then his? how can something less then half the price be just as good?
One stick of DDR3 is going to be slower than two sticks of DDR2 because two sticks will be run together, kind of like RAID-1 for memory. One of the big benefits of DDR3 is the ability to do this with three sticks (or on some boards 2 sets of 3 sticks each), but most users will never use this advantage. Thus, on a video card where the memory is setup for maximum performance, DDR4 is faster than DDR3 is faster than DDR2.
DDR3 sacrifices latency for bandwidth. Depending on the usage DDR2 can outperform DDR3. It also depends on the maker as all RAM is not made equal. When running only a single stick you don't get the bandwidth advantage but still have the latency penalty. I would only go DDR3 on a motherboard for the i7's where it has a socket that i'll be able to use with faster chips that can make good use of future, faster memory clock speeds.
After finding out mine was faster my mate has now sold his DDR3 board for a DDR2 one. I've just found out he had did have 2 strips...
Unless you're doing some crazy overclocking most people don't even use their memory at the speed it's rated at. For instance your stock Q6600 run 2.4Ghz from 9x333Mhz. With a double pumped FSB the ram is only running at 667Mhz anyways, even if you have 800+ RAM.
Most people do use their ram at the rated speed; FSB is not the determining factor in ram speed anymore (we are not using slot 1!). The fact is that memory (and much else) can run much faster than the FSB. A good example is that my mainboard is theoreticaly capable of DDR2-2000 (if they made 1000mhz memory), it can do this (in theory; I am not sure how much the chipset could actualy handle) with my Pheonom 9950 which has only a 200MHZ fsb, but has 2ghz hyperthreading. I am amazed that one stick of DDR2 was faster than two sticks of DDR3; the only thing I can think of there is that he may not have set them up correctly. Personaly, I am sticking with my DDR2 until AMD or Intel makes an affordable CPU & chipset that will make good use of DDR3.
