Recently I published an article titled “DDR2 Memory Frequency Performance” which looked at the value of high speed memory. The reason I found the need to write such an article was to demonstrate that there really is no need to try and overclock your memory when pushing a Core 2 Duo processor to the max. Often readers complain about poor Core 2 Duo overclocking performance and 99% of the time it comes down to memory instability at higher frequencies. This article showed that when running a Core 2 Duo E6700 on a 500MHz FSB, DDR2-667 was just as fast as DDR2-1181 memory and in some cases even faster.

Before I move on with this second memory related article, I would just like to address a few questions some readers had about the DDR2 Memory Frequency Performance article. Some felt the results were flawed because we only tested with the nForce 650i SLI chipset. However in the past, similar tests were run on the 975X and 965P chipsets as well as the new nForce 680i SLI chipset. Another point that was raised is that the Intel Core 2 Duo processors work best with a 1:1 memory ratio. This means that on their standard 266MHz FSB DDR2-533 memory would only be necessary and given our results I would not dispute this fact.

The point of the DDR2 Memory Frequency Performance article was to prove that when overclocking, the 1:1 ratio is not important and we proved this with the 1066MHz configuration. Moving on, there were a few good suggestions made by readers about the first article that they would have liked to have seen. That being a broader range of memory timings, not just memory frequencies, so it could be determined whether low-latency DDR2-800 memory for example, was really required. While this kind of testing could have been done with DDR2-533 or even DDR2-667 memory, we chose DDR2-800 memory as it is the more popular choice. Furthermore, the price difference between these three standards is often very minimal.

Therefore the DDR2-800 memory was tested with CAS 3-3-3-8 T1, CAS 4-4-4-12 T1, CAS 4-4-4-12 T2, CAS 5-5-5-15 T2 and even CAS 6-6-6-18 T2 timings. This time all the testing was done on the ASUS Striker Extreme which uses the Nvidia nForce 680i SLI chipset with the Core 2 Duo E6700 processor clock at its default operating frequency. Again this is primarily gaming related and not a general usage article, since high-speed expensive memory is generally associated with gaming!