ddr "2" ?

[Ch3tan]

Right I saw a radeon 9800 pro advertised with ddr2.

So what is ddr2? Will it make a difference, is it worth it?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Jonty]

Hi Ch3tan

I'm not too au fait with DDR2, but from what I understand it's 'the next big thing' in high-end memory, and is expected to really take off next year. It's set to be manufactured on a 0.11 micron level process (very small and very precise, graphcs cards, for example, are mostly manufactured on a 0.15 or 0.13 micron scale). Not only is DDR2 faster than today's DDR, but it also consumes less power and dissipates less heat.

Kingston's PC4300 DDR2 DIMMs yield a peak data transfer rate of 4.3GBps and 8.6GBps if they're put into a dual-channel system.

Perhaps the only problem at the moment is its cost. nVidia's NV30 utilised DDR2 memory, but in doing so, particularly at that time, the cost of the card went up significantly. It was hard to tell whether or not it was worth it because the card was limited to 128-bit memory bus (whereas ATi, and now nVidia too, utilise 256-bit buses).

Kind Regards

 

[Ch3tan]

The cards are around the £370 mark, 256mb ddr2 radeon 9800 pro. Very pricey, so I think I'm not going this route until somone lowers the cost.

What kind of price are these kingston ddr2 dimms? Google didnt help me find anything.

 

[Embattle]

You won't really finds prices for DDR2 dimms because apart from the engineering samples they aren't really being produced, although they are set to start appearing in early 2004 with mass production by 2005.

 

[Xavier]

DDR2

On the motherboard side DDR2 is going to need a motherboard chipset which supports it - so at the moment there will be no DIMMs on the market which support the standard. Validation boards from intel and NVIDIA exist but aside from that you won't hear (or see) a bean.

With regards to video cards, there are so far two consumer products which have used DDR2 memories. The short-lived GeForceFX 5800 Ultra (NV30's basically) and the Radeon you mentioned.

The important thing to know is that there are two ways of using DDR2 on a graphics card - the first, in the case of the 5800 is to have native DDR2 support on the GPU, which means you instantly take benefit of the higher clockspeeds (in this case 1Ghz+) and super-low latencies.

In the case of the Radeon 9800 Pro 256Mb, ATI opted for DDR2 as it was the only way to technically wire a quarter of a gigabyte to their GPU, with DDR1 128Mb was their limit (DDR2 memories are already available in denser modules than DDR1 ever was). They raised the memory frequency compared to the 128Mb not only to improve performance but also because their GPU doesn't support DDR2 memories natively, and running under emulation introduces latency - something they needed to counteract.

So at present, the only real benefit of getting that card is if you run stuff which is going to use over 128Mb frame buffer regularly... so far the only cases of which will be running at uber-high res on a ninja system with piles of AA+AF, or using techdemos like th 'last chance' petrol station NVIDIA used to promote the 5900 Ultra, which so far is the only app known to use almost all of a 256Mb frame buffer as standard.

DDR2 isn't going to hit graphics cards again to be honest, GDDR3 is the way forwards, and both NVIDIA and ATI are rumoured to have Micron GDDR3 validation boards already - a couple of which were photographed during Computex last week

Xav

 

[Ch3tan]

Heh, way more info than I hoped for, cheers guys