Build soon or wait? DDR2 vs DDR3

A

anonuser

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Dec 28, 2006
Messages
1,084
I travel a lot and was planning on building a new system in mid April when I am home.

Now I read a lot about DDR3 and upcoming motherboard chipsets. How soon do you think it would be viable to build a DDR3 rig?

I know that there is always something on the horizon, but this seems like a big change...

I was planning on a system built around an e6600 or e6700 and a 680i chipset with the Buffalo Firestix.

Any input would be much appreciated.
 
DDR3 is going to be expensive. I wouldn't bother waiting. You'll probably have to wait even longer if you want to get an nForce motherboard with DDR3 support. Then it'll still be a while until a descent BIOS version is released.
 
How often do you build yourself a new computer? I don't see an E6600 based computer with DDR2 not being able to be a viable option with newer video cards in 2 years. If you only upgrade every 3 or 4 years, maybe you'd want to at least wait and see if there are any performance advantages. I don't see there being any real advantage until at least one or two months after Intel releases their new chipset and prices start to level off on DDR3 and the new motherboards.

All that to say...I'd probably buy now, but that's based on my upgrade cycle (usually a new computer every year ;) ).
 
worst thing you can do is wait for new technology to come out. Just bite it and grabbed the ddr2
 
Ture. Just buy your new computer when you need it. Theres always something new so if you wait 3 months then your gonna see or hear something new and wanna wait another 3 months. It never ends.
Im holding up since I do play games and im sure 95% of your people do or else you wouldnt be spending the money you do to look at porn :)
Since next gen games are out end of this year i decided to wait becuase thats when ill truley need it. I would have been evern more ok with this if my bloody xbox 360 didnt brake! I have no good gaming machines anymore. AHHHH
 
Thanks for the advice, I'm sure a lot of people are worrying about this same issue.

I suppose I'll wait until the April price cuts and then bite the bullet and build my new system.

It's been about 4 years since I built my last system, and honestly it was viable in any game up until a year ago. An athlon xp 2100 OC'd system w/a geforce6600gt (added after old card 9800 died).

It just sucks to start a new build with a different architecture right around the corner... but I guess there always is one right around the corner.
 
Honestly buddy, if your going with a new machine just get yourself either a good C2D setup, (ie. 6400 or 6600 chips) and decent mobo or go with a fairly good AMD2 chip. Right now, i would be leaning towards the 6600. ive heard of people getting close to 4 ghz on air sometimes
 
DDR3 and the new Bearlake chipset will take a while to come down in price. Right now DDR2 can be had for a bargain, and considering how old you system is it is best to upgrade now while it's affordable, rather than wait another year with your slow outdated system until prices are reasonable on the new technology. You can always upgrade in the future!

Intel right now is doing some major price cuts throughout the year, so waiting until even the end of April may be a smart move and then pick up a good priced Core 2 Duo. Get 2GB of PC6400 DDR2 memory and you are set ! You would get yourself a nice overclock on stock voltages and voila you will be set for a couple more years, and by that time DDR3 will be affordable and you can pick up a quad or octa core processor ;) My strategy is that I can wait for new stuff, I just have to know my limits and have a game plan to go by. I upgraded to Core 2 Duo and rehauled my entire system last year when they first came out, and so now looking at the timeline, I don't really need anything better until:

A) Solid state hard drives over 100GB are released that offer substantial performance boost... let's face it, the hard drive is the slowest component of a PC
B) 4GB of DDR3 memory is affordable, as well as a quad or more core processor

As long as you have a rough guide as when you will be overhauling your system, you are OK to upgrade at any time.
 
I'm in the exact same position as the OP and I think the time to upgrade is April for sure.
I'm still sitting on my P4 3.2ghz and 6800GT agp system, and it's been a great workhorse up until this year. Now that new games are on the horizon, the time to pony up has come!

Personally I think I will wait for Bearlake chipsets with the new round of motherboards that should arrive in April to May. Many of these boards will support DDR2 as well as DDR3, as well as support for upcoming 45nm chips running on the 1333mhz front side bus. I'd go ahead and bite on a solid 680i board but since bearlake was just shown at CEBit, I think waiting for the new mobos and intel price cuts makes for a perfect time to plunk down for a new system.

So for me, it'll likely be go for a cheap e6300 in April and when Q3 price cuts come, go for a higher end CPU on the cheap!
 
Devolution said:
Many of these boards will support DDR2 as well as DDR3, as well as support for upcoming 45nm chips running on the 1333mhz front side bus. I'd go ahead and bite on a solid 680i board but since bearlake was just shown at CEBit, I think waiting for the new mobos and intel price cuts makes for a perfect time to plunk down for a new system.

So for me, it'll likely be go for a cheap e6300 in April and when Q3 price cuts come, go for a higher end CPU on the cheap!
Click to expand...


Correct me if I'm wrong, but won' the 680i boards support the 1333mhz FSB CPUs?
 
Right, the 680i boards will be compatible with the core 2 refresh with 1333mhz FSB in Q3 of this year, but it's not clear whether the 45nm chips due in 2008 will work in these boards.

However these chips will work with intels upcoming bearlake chipset, which is the only thing I'm holding out on. Plus the board will allow you to use DDR2 now and if DDR3 ever becomes affordable, you can use DDR3 at that point in time as well since some of the bearlake boards will have both slots for DDR2 and DDR3. Of course we have yet to see how these new boards perform, but they do have one great upgrade path in front of them :)

Let's pray intel has it right
 
Well, you could always buy now and when 4gb of DDR3 becomes affordable (can't be that soon...) you could just buy a new motherboard along with it.

I guess that's what I'm going to do.
 
so on a 680i whats the best system you can run (include upcoming releases that'll run on it)
and whats bearlake?
 
Teknokid said:
so on a 680i whats the best system you can run (include upcoming releases that'll run on it)
and whats bearlake?
Click to expand...

I would say the best system is a 65nm Quad core running at 1333mhz FSB. 8GB of DDR2 memory (4x2GB). 2x8900GTX (or GX2 for quad core SLI) or whatever the Nvidia refresh is going to be once the R600 comes out. After that, things might run or might not depending on how the 45nm pans out.

Bearlake is Intel's new chipset which will replace the 975X I'd imagine. There's probably a 965 replacement too out there somewhere. It supports DDR3, PCIe v. 2, and the 45nm cores. Probably backward compatible with DDR2 memory (IIRC, they are the same physical slots just different voltages), and definitely backward compatible with current C2D/C2Q CPU's.
 
kirbyrj said:
I would say the best system is a 65nm Quad core running at 1333mhz FSB. 8GB of DDR2 memory (4x2GB). 2x8900GTX (or GX2 for quad core SLI) or whatever the Nvidia refresh is going to be once the R600 comes out. After that, things might run or might not depending on how the 45nm pans out.

Bearlake is Intel's new chipset which will replace the 975X I'd imagine. There's probably a 965 replacement too out there somewhere. It supports DDR3, PCIe v. 2, and the 45nm cores. Probably backward compatible with DDR2 memory (IIRC, they are the same physical slots just different voltages), and definitely backward compatible with current C2D/C2Q CPU's.
Click to expand...

Aren't there going to be different versions of the Bearlake chipset. From what i've heard, the earliest ones won't have PCI-e 2.0 support.
 
The later revisions of Bearlake coming in Q3 of 2007 will have 2x PCI Express 2.0 slots and will support only DDR3 ram. The earlier bearlake models will have support for DDR2 and DDR3, but run on the traditional current form of PCI Express.

As a note, PCI Express 2.0 is backwards compatible with current PCI express.
 
Devolution said:
I'm in the exact same position as the OP and I think the time to upgrade is April for sure.
I'm still sitting on my P4 3.2ghz and 6800GT agp system, and it's been a great workhorse up until this year. Now that new games are on the horizon, the time to pony up has come!

Personally I think I will wait for Bearlake chipsets with the new round of motherboards that should arrive in April to May. Many of these boards will support DDR2 as well as DDR3, as well as support for upcoming 45nm chips running on the 1333mhz front side bus. I'd go ahead and bite on a solid 680i board but since bearlake was just shown at CEBit, I think waiting for the new mobos and intel price cuts makes for a perfect time to plunk down for a new system.

So for me, it'll likely be go for a cheap e6300 in April and when Q3 price cuts come, go for a higher end CPU on the cheap!
Click to expand...

This is sound advice.

I don't like to see people saying "just buy now don't wait on new technology".

There's definitely different times of the cycle that can allow you to get the most bang for your buck/usability.

A cheap but rather high end solution in APril is going to have some livability in it for quite some time, and won't be so hard on the wallet.
 
Mansize_tissue said:
Aren't there going to be different versions of the Bearlake chipset. From what i've heard, the earliest ones won't have PCI-e 2.0 support.
Click to expand...

I'm excited to see what can be done with PCI-e 2.0 that can't be done with PCI-e 1.0....

does anyone have any idea what's going to take advantage of this bandwidth/what can use this?

As I understand it PCI-e1.0 is already more than enoguh.... so I'm curious.
 
Yeah, I'd guess pci-e 2.0 is for futureproofing. I don't think any of the graphics ports ever since AGP was introduced could have been utilized 100% at the time of their introduction.. they all were oriented toward future hardware..
 
Teknikallysekure said:
This is sound advice.

I don't like to see people saying "just buy now don't wait on new technology".

There's definitely different times of the cycle that can allow you to get the most bang for your buck/usability.

A cheap but rather high end solution in APril is going to have some livability in it for quite some time, and won't be so hard on the wallet.
Click to expand...

Totally how I feel Tek, worded just right. I really do feel April is a great time for people to spend $800-$1500 on a new system that will give great performance and have a solid upgrade path.

I agree that PCI express 2.0 is just futureproofing, and from all I've read and heard...PCI express 1.0 will be more then fine for the next few years.
 
Devolution said:
I agree that PCI express 2.0 is just futureproofing, and from all I've read and heard...PCI express 1.0 will be more then fine for the next few years.
Click to expand...

This is why i'm not waiting on this technology, and won't be using it anytime soon because there's really no point. I'm guessing that it will only be utilised at least a year or 2 after it is released anyway, like you said, so it's really not anything to base a 2007 rig around, because most people will have built another before PCI-e 2.0 has any real use.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top