The other day I thought I might take my DDR2 out to 7-7-7-20 la-la-land to show the DDR3 fanboys that it might not be a big drop, but there was a drop at those timings.

Oddly, I couldn't find any WMDs.

Since I was messing with my gear's settings already, I took my DDR2-800 down to 667 and got nil in real-world difference. Cranked it from 7-7-7-20 to 4-4-4-12. Again, no big deal.

The margin for error in the tests I was using was larger than the performance changes when going from 667 7-7-7-20 to DDR2-890 and 5-5-5-16.

In the end, I just took the volts back down to 1.80V and left it at DDR2-667 and auto-timings, since that's sync to my 1333 FSB.

FYI, CL5 @ 1375MHz is about the same latency as CL3 @ 800MHz

Yea DDR3 aint' worth it yet from a sheer performance only or for that matter a bang vs. buck prespective, looks like AMD made the right choice in holding off migrating to it. Now only if they could start making similarly well thought out decisions in its GPU/CPU business...

I'm quite happy sticking with Kingston Value RAM in my gaming rigs, thanks. I'll use the savings to beef up other components.

In a nutshell, DDR3 is effectively energy-efficient DDR2.

The main promise of the standard is allowing memory guys to make higher density modules without requiring cream of the crop chips.

If they can make sticks with these latencies and rated speed this early on it bodes well for DDR3. Once it's ramped up and tweaked and the price obviously becomes mainstream it ought to provide better real latency and bandwidth than DDR2. Probably be Spring 2009 before I get any though.

Dont know where they think they are going to get customers at with those prices. Good Luck. Of course SOME idiot with more cash than brains will buy some for bragging rights. Doesn't help that you wont even have enough ram to have true bragging rights.

Yeah, no thanks.

I dunno about DDR3, but going from DDR2 CAS5 to CAS4 made zero appreciable difference with the exact same memory in the exact same system in my C2D.

I would hate to pony up what is tantamount to a complete system just to find out that it makes little to zero improvement in my computing experience.

Yikes, that 2GB kit costs more than my new system. And >10x more than my 2GB DDR2.

Low-latency DDR3 is just not the place to be right now.