Would be nice to see how they overclock. But still too expensive.

fuck ddr3

Quote: "During video encoding speed tests any DDR3-1800 will again show its best leaving DDR2 SDRAM with any timings and frequencies far behind".

But the picture shows otherwise: there is less then 3% difference between ddr3 1800 and ddr2 900....

Author used words such as "tremendous" when the slight improvements of overclocked DDR3 were not statistically significant (although hopefully reproducible) and the delta FPS in games would "never" be noticed by a user.
One should never do testing when one already has decided what is the desired outcome.

Great article, Ilya! I'm amazed at the huge jump in WinRAR--are you sure it's correct?

Funny thing is that now we can have DDR3 just as fast as that found on an 8800GT! (hint.. hint.., @ Nvidia, stop being so cheap and give us GDDR4 that does not bottleneck the 8800GT so badly, and also give us 1 GB for DX10 games, unlike plain vanilla 6600 from 2 years ago with 512MB RAM)

The difference isn't that substantial, the end user wouldn't notice it. Plus there's the price difference, which is substantial. The Corsair memory that you test here is $700 at my local computer shop, where the Corsair Dominator DDR2 1066 is $208 (after $40 rebate). I'm NOT going to pay $500 for a 3 - 5% perforance difference!

That being said, I think that DDR3 is very disappointing. DDR2 is cheap and performes exceptionally well, which I think should have been your conclusion.

These reviews are superb! This is the stuff we neeed to know before investing thousands of dollars into a system!
Thanks XBIT LABS!

its a shame that there aren't motherboards that can accept and support the DDR3 1800 timings

I'm pretty shocked, like some of the other readers have commented, by the wording in this article. There is almost negligible difference between DDR3 1800 and the DDR2 configurations tested, yet we are being told to leave behind the DDR2? Urm...

Very, very strange article. The words tell me I should plan my next build around DDR3. The results tell me to go DDR2!

Understand the frustration at the price and benchmarks not too much higher than DDR2. Having said that I could not overclock my E8400 over 3.6 until I added DDR3 1800 Mhz. Now I am up to 4.0! Well worth the aprox 210 bucks OZ charges... and the combination of higher memory and higher chipset makes my system scream!