DDR vs. DDR2 - What it means to you.

The contestants

Thanks to our friends at Corsair, we are going to pit some top rated DDR and DDR2 modules up against one another and let you decide how things fare in the upgrade decision. For DDR, we have our TwinX PC3200XL modules which will be going against the new DDR2 PC5400 units.

 

As you can tell from the labels, what DDR2 makes up for in speed, it loses in latency timings.

Testing

We first thought of a head to head comparison for these two standards when we saw that Gigabyte had come out with a motherboard supporting both DDR and DDR2 which would make the testing as fair as possible. Using the same motherboard and chipset would prevent any outside factors from influencing the test results.

Test Setup

• Gigagbyte GA-8I915P-Duo motherboard 915 chipset

• Intel LGA 775 2.8GHz Prescott CPU

• Hitachi 80GB SATA HDD

• Lite-On DVD-Rom

• Albatron PCX5750

• Windows XP SP1

Testing

• SISoft Sandra 2004 Memory Bandwidth Benchmark

• PC Magazine Business Winstone 2004

• PC Magazine Content Creation 2004

• Far Cry

• Unreal Tournament 2004

One of the limitations of our motherboard is it's lack of DDR2 667 support. It will only support up to DDR2 533. We will of course be running the DDR memory at DDR400 while the PC5400 runs at DDR2 533. All other memory settings will be stock.
 

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