DDR2 533 to DDR2 800 Scaling

While we didn’t have any luck getting higher rated DDR2 memory to work on the Asus board, our Chinese friend windwithme jumped in and provides us with some interesting benchmarks which compare the performance increase you’ll see from increasing the memory bandwidth. He used the following system:

windwithme's AM2 Test Setup
CPU	AM2 Althon64 X2 4800+
Mainboard	MSI K9N SLI Platinum
Memory	2*512MB Patriot DDR2 1000
Video	nVidia 6800 Ultra
Other	Seagate 7200.7 80Gb AcBel 550W PSU

The CPU was configured to run at 2000Mhz, and using the motherboard divisors the memory was run at 3 different speeds: PC5300, PC6400 and PC8500. The memory timings were the same for all speeds CL3 3-3-8 1T, PC8500 was also tested at 2T.



The benchmarks:








Those memory bandwidth dependant benchmarks shows quite an increase going from PC5300 to PC8500, 2T timings does impact performance, bringing PC8500 performance almost on par with PC6400.

If you look again at how SuperPi scales in our limited overclocking test



S939 calculation time decreases with 2,2 seconds, the AM2’s score decreases with 3 seconds, as DDR2 bandwidth goes up the AM2 platform catches up, if you look at the SuperPi scores from windwithme you see that going from PC5300 to PC6400 is enough for a 2,2 drop, even higher DDR2 memory speeds don’t bring the same performance increase however, as the Athlon 64 architecture doesn’t make use of this extra bandwidth.

Let’s wrap things up ->