Introduction

The world of the PC enthusiast as we all know, is a fast moving place. It was not a month ago that we reviewed the then fastest DDR-3 kit of Supertalent's line-up, a kit rated at 1333MHz with 9-9-9 timings. This is now already "slow" compared to what we have in store for you today. The latest and fastest DDR-3 kit from SuperTalent is not only rated for operation at 1600MHz, but they also operate with 7-7-7 timings at that speed. Despite the current low demand for DDR-3 RAM, SuperTalent has just released the fastest 2GB RAM kit available.

DDR2 and DDR3 modules are not interchangeable and while the new P35 chipset can work with either of them, motherboards which have slots for DDR2 and DDR3 RAM will not work with both kinds of RAM installed. The DDR3 modules also require less power than DDR2 (1.5V instead of 1.8V) but we expect enthusiast modules to require 1.7V or more in the near future.

With regards to speed, it seems that DDR3 modules start from where the fastest DDR2 modules left off. DDR3 PC3-6400 (800MHz) and DDR3 PC3-8500 (1066MHz) are offered as ‘mainstream’ modules and PC3-1067 (1333MHz) and above are currently offered as high speed overclocking RAM. The best enthusiast DDR2 modules are currently struggling to reach 1250MHz and require voltage settings much higher than the 1.8V DDR2 standard. DDR3 timings appear considerably inferior to those of high-performance DDR2 modules but they are not directly comparable since the 8-bit pre-fetch buffer and the introduction of more technologies (such as power saving features, i.e. the auto self refresh and partial array self refresh) has them doing more things per cycle. Considering the rate that new kits are released, we feel that it won’t be long before we witness 1866MHz and even >2GHz modules available for sale, but it will certainly take several months, perhaps even years for DDR3 to overthrow DDR2 modules in the mainstream market. DDR2 RAM production is not going to decrease in the following months at the very least.