And there are a lot of applications that don't rely that much on memory performance. Take the final rendering task as an example:

The difference is no bigger than 1% here and is hard to see in the graphs. 

The speed of encoding media content depends but little on the memory speed, but the diagram shows that the use of extremely fast DDR2 SDRAM can bring you a 5% advantage over the configuration with the slowest memory subsystem. 

Fortunately for manufacturers of speedy memory, there are applications where fast DDR2 SDRAM can make a difference. Particularly, it is WinRAR, an application that we always use to see the benefits of a faster memory subsystem or a larger CPU cache. Here, DDR2-1067 SDRAM enjoys a nearly 50% advantage over DDR2-533 SDRAM on the Core 2 Duo platform. Yet you should keep it in mind that this is only a special case. In a majority of applications the positive effect from faster memory is negated by the limited bandwidth of the front-side bus that connects the chipset's North Bridge with the CPU.