Does cachechk or any gaming benchmarks show an improvement on your system when using ddr3 over ddr2?

feipoa wrote:

Does cachechk or any gaming benchmarks show an improvement on your system when using ddr3 over ddr2?

don't know. I currently don't have any extra DDR3 RAM sticks. I just went with DDR2 after a few people I talked to advised to go for more over faster.

soviet conscript wrote:

I was thinking about this and I know if can be a very general question that depends on other factors but as a broad question what is generally considered better for a PC gaming environment, more RAM or faster RAM?

I have 2 examples myself. first is a modern board I have. It supports either 4GB of DDR2 or 2GB of DDR3. from the couple people I talked to In the Windows XP gaming environment I'm going to set up most people tell me to go with 4GB (or 3.5 for XP) of DDR2

now I also had two power macs, a G3 upgraded 7600 and a G3 machine. they were both fairly similar but the 7600 only supported DRAM to a limit of 1GB while the G3 could handle SDRAM to a limit of 768MB. what would generally perform better in a gaming environment if were only taking RAM into consideration?

That won't be a fair comparison because the 7600 has a 50mhz bus while the G3 has a 66mhz bus. That would tip the memory access times in favor of the G3. I don't think the difference of 256mb of memory is substantial enough in everyday use to matter. A power user might prefer more RAM to faster RAM, but for simple tasks faster would matter more. I have a 7500 upgraded to a 1ghz G4, but in no way is it competitive with a 1ghz Quicksilver machine. The QS has a 133mhz bus that just kills the 7500 in every way even if you matched the rest of the parts as closely as you could.

"More" and "faster" are relative terms; the relativistic answer I'll give you is:

You need *enough* RAM and it should be as fast as possible.

With your WindowsXP example, the differences between DDR2 and DDR3 in real-world performance are generally minimal, so having another 1GB+ is probably more beneficial than the slight speed-bump from DDR3. That said, depending on the rest of the system's hardware and what games you want to play, it may not matter at all - 2GB is quite a lot of memory by WindowsXP standards, and should be sufficient for most older games (say, up through DirectX 8 releases; there are plenty of DirectX 9 games that will happily run on a system with 2GB as well).

In general I would look to make sure your gaming platform has enough RAM to meet or exceed the OS and game requirements - if the game wants 512MB, having 1GB is probably a good thing, but having 12GB probably won't matter at all (usually once you've gone beyond whatever the application's requirements are, you won't realize any performance benefits). Once that's done, get the quickest memory you can reasonably put into the machine (of course this may not always result in any big performance improvement - for example going from DDR3 1333 to 1600 isn't something I'd spend the money on if you already have the 1333 on-hand).