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- Date:
- Thursday , August 02, 2007
- Author:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
Corsair DDR3 Product Preview @ 2GHz
We showcase the future of DDR3 using Corsair’s next generation DDR3 memory that scales to 2GHz clock speeds. We also discuss pricing, real world expectations, and the DDR3 memory module market in general in our first DDR3 memory article.
Today’s DDR3
The Bad News
First let’s cover the DDR3 situation from a supply point of view. Very “few” DDR3 ICs are being made this year. Be aware that system integrators such as Dell and HP are very much on top of the list when it comes to who will actually be able to buy sticks of DDR3 RAM in bulk. This leaves the computer hardware enthusiast in an immoderate purchasing situation. DDR3 is very far from becoming a commodity for quite a while and “deals” are going to be few and far between. DDR3 will remain at a price premium through Q108 and possibly even further. It is just going to be expensive to move your system to DDR3 now.
Now I know some of you are thinking, “I will just buy the slower rated sticks that will likely overclock well.” If you can find those sticks, more power to you. DDR3 is being released in such small quantities that finding a memory builder putting it on the market at anything less than 1333MHz is going to be a stretch for a while. Even then, it is not likely to be “bargain” pricing.
The other downside to DDR3 is the stock performance. A system using DDR3 at 1066MHz 8.8.8.24 is indistinguishable to a user running the “same” system with DDR2 at 800MHz at 5.5.5.15. In that same vein, DDR3 1333 is about equal to DDR2 1066 in terms of raw and real world performance. If you were to take the “Pepsi Challenge” with the above comparisons, it is highly unlikely that you would ever notice the difference in setups unless running synthetic benchmarks. Now obviously if you are wanting to move to DDR3 you would most likely be wanting to do that in order to run at a stock 1333MHz with a new Intel Core 2 Duo 1333MHz bus speed processor, or you would want to be at the very least overclocking your CPU and RAM to 1333MHz or higher speeds. This is not to frame DDR3 with a lot of Doom & Gloom, but rather to point out that DDR2 has a lot of miles left in terms of system performance for the money that you will pay for it.
The Good News
If you are willing to shell out the big bucks for DDR3, it looks as though it is going to scale incredibly. Obviously you are going to need a solid overclocking setup to accomplish this. Meaning you need the right RAM, motherboard, and the right CPU. Where DDR3 really starts to shine is right around the 1700MHz to 1800MHz mark. From what we have seen there are likely going to be many sticks in the market place that will be able to reach these heights.
“Real World” RAM
Corsair called us and asked if we wanted to preview their next high-end model of DDR3, and of course we jumped on the opportunity.
What we got was two very normal looking sticks of Corsair’s Dominator series RAM with no part numbers or identifying marks. Now obviously we were interested in what is under those heatspreaders and it is Micron’s Z9HWQ “ES” series IC. These ICs came to Corsair in a very limited amount and were to be used for engineering samples.
These sticks, as identified in their SPD settings, were stock at 9.9.9.24 latency timings. As we saw in Taiwan, the timings were slowed to 10.10.10.24 in order to reach the magic 2GHz mark and that is exactly what we wanted to do on our own test bench to see just how reliable the sticks were.
I am not going to try to spin this in any way, shape, or form. It was not easy to get this kit to the 2GHz mark and took a couple of days of trying in order to get the right settings with the correct hardware. I did go through no less than five Core 2 Duo processors before I found that “magic” combination. Understand as well that while Corsair did explain it was possible, it was not necessarily an easy feat to accomplish. I did however finally get to my 2GHz mark with an Intel E6700 on an ASUS P5K3 at 10.10.10.24 timings (yes, the screen shot shows “25” cycle time, but “24” ran fine). The Achilles’ heel in all of this is the fact that I had to run the DDR3 voltage at 2.25V. There are a lot of folks that would suggest that this is not a “safe” voltage for DDR3 and I would wholeheartedly agree with them unless you are using some fairly exotic cooling for your RAM. For everyday usage though, 1.85V that we are seeing as the stock rating on many sticks works just fine and does not seem to jeopardize your hardware investment.
We were even able to blow away the MB/s rating that we posted in Taiwan by a good bit. Our highest accomplished stable run was 8731MB/s as measured with SiSoft Sandra.
While we would like to, we are attributing this healthy Sandra score not to our super-1337 skillz, but rather maturation of the ASUS P5K3 BIOS over the last two months.
As mentioned earlier, we have seen Kingston announce “low latency” DDR3 so we of course wondered what exactly would we be able to pull off with our Corsair memory. With a voltage of 1.85v, which is seemingly becoming fairly standard for current low latency DDR3, we were able to run a stable 6.6.6.15 compared to the assigned SPD settings of 9.9.9.24. At 1333MHz the more aggressive timings gave us a bump of about 200MB/s. Not shabby, but as you will see below a lot more bandwidth can be realized by scaling the DDR3 clock.
One thing that we are hoping to see out of production memory is realizing more aggressive timings towards the top end of the clock spectrum. We are already seeing some other packages yield even more impressive results. As noted, we have more RAM spotlight articles coming soon.