Intel’s new Bearlake platform is already available on the market, even if the official launch hasn’t been made yet, but P35-based motherboards are starting to appear in all kinds of disguises and the most interesting bit is that you can pick whether you want DDR2 or DDR3. The Intel P35 chipset namely supports both memory technologies and the question is which you want to pick as a consumer. The more established DDR2 technology or the coming DDR3 technology. At Anandtech they’ve now published a comparison of Intel’s P35 chipset with today’s P965 chipset, where they focus on DDR2 vs. DDR3.
DDR2 has reached some really high frequencies during the last few months, while the DDR3 technology will go even higher with DDR3-1333 and DDR3-1600 modules. We should add that we have been selected to test the first DDR3-1333 memory kit from one of the leading and most respected memory manufacturers we have today, you can count on us delivering more reports on this very topic.
The one thing the DDR3 technology lacks is aggressive latencies. This gives DDR2 the upper hand in benchmarks where the bandwidth is not vital for the performance. However there is one thing that seems to stand out and more or less steal the show and that is the memory controller of the P35 chipset. Just by switching to P35 they gained 15-18% memory bandwidth.
“DDR3 may not be in your buying plan today, but it will certainly be there in the future. As DDR3 prices drop and/or timings improve, it will be the performance choice. For today, the best performance choice is either today’s DDR2 or tomorrow’s DDR3 on the P35 chipset instead.”
