Real Difference between 800 and 1066?

[venom077]

I'm pretty sure you cant tell but does anybody out there actually see a real world difference between DDR2 800 and 1066? I'm building a new phenom 2 rig and I seriously doubt you can tell the difference. Any thoughts?

[MrWizard6600]

who can see the difference between 2.6 GHz and 2.4? or even 2.6 and 2.2? or even 2.6 and 1.8!?

It's a cumulative effect. Faster memory always gives this nice little zippity bump in performance, somewhere on the order of 5% when you really make memory bandwidth a big deal, but it isn't the end of the world if you don't get it.

And these days, most DDR2 800 CAS 4 is capable of running at 1066MHz CAS 5. So its not something you really have to worry about.

[Bigbacon]

you won't be able to tell.

[Mike Clements]

Especially on Phenoms, you won't see much difference.

I would suggest either getting a PC8500 kit or a CAS3 or CAS4 PC6400 kit. The lowest latencies you can run and OCing the CPU and memory up from DDR800 will be the best combo. But, if you don't increase the CPU speed and only increase from DDR800 to 1066, 1066 might give you up to a 5% increase over DDR800 in benches and applications.

[Malakai]

Bus goes from 400mhz to 533mhz. Figure out the % increase that is, thats how much faster the memory subsystem will be. Itll be a few % overall increase, not much but...
1066 sticks are maybe 5-10 bucks more per 4gb than 800 so why not? Just dont get anything less than cas5@1066

[venom077]

Thanks for the input everybody. I ordered a phenom 2 940 black so i'm going with some gskill 1066 and a heathy overclock.

[GTIZI]

on my e6600 I saw a big difference from 6400 and 8500 ram.
overclocking was soo much better.

[eastpetersen]

good choice like the previous poster said it makes oc much easier because of the extra headroom, allowed me to get an extra 400 mhz out of my e6300 over 800 ram, from 2.9 to 3.31

[lathode]

Are you going with 4 or 8 gigs? PhII's don't like 4 sticks runnig at 1066. I have my 1066 CAS 5 Dominators running at 800 CAS4.

edit: Also extra headroom isn't really a concern with an unlocked multi.

[venom077]

I'm just going with 2x2gb. Got 4 gigs in my current core2 rig and i've barely seen it hit two the whole time ive had it.

[Varmint]

I'm pretty sure you cant tell but does anybody out there actually see a real world difference between DDR2 800 and 1066? I'm building a new phenom 2 rig and I seriously doubt you can tell the difference. Any thoughts?

It really depends on what hardware you have. I think there's situations where 1066 would help, maybe with dual GPUs or a quad.

You can extrapolate DDR2-800 below - probably no difference between that and 1066 on my hardware.

Crysis GPU bench, e5200 3.33 GHz, FSB = 333 mHz

DDR2-667 -----------------> DDR2-1066
min 30.4 ----------------------------> min 32.0
avg 44.0 fps -----------------------> avg 44.1 fps

[BababooeyHTJ]

you won't be able to tell.

BS With a moderatly high fsb you can definetly notice the difference between 1:1 and 5:6 on an Intel chipset. I don't have much experience with AMD boards so I really can't say much there.