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Skylake & DDR3

M76

M76

[H]F Junkie
Joined
Jun 12, 2012
Messages
15,268
I'm a bit confused about this. Will my old DDR3 sticks work with skylake and if the answer is yes, how much of a performance deficit can I expect compared to running with DDR4?

Because if I can upgrade to skylake without buying new memory it might be a good value upgrade. I'd have already made the jump to X99 if not for the crazy DDR4 prices.

I think this is more of a cpu architecture question than a ram one, that's why I'm posting it here.
 
Will my old DDR3 sticks work with skylake and if the answer is yes
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I think you will be able to get a few DDR3 only skylake motherboards but the option will probably not be worth taking if you plan to replace the ram when DDR4 becomes cheaper than DDR3. I do not believe we will see boards that support both DDR3 and DDR4.
 
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M76 said:
I'm a bit confused about this. Will my old DDR3 sticks work with skylake and if the answer is yes, how much of a performance deficit can I expect compared to running with DDR4?

Because if I can upgrade to skylake without buying new memory it might be a good value upgrade. I'd have already made the jump to X99 if not for the crazy DDR4 prices.

I think this is more of a cpu architecture question than a ram one, that's why I'm posting it here.
Click to expand...

As far as I know, the memory controller will support DDR3 and DDR4, but Intel is leaving it up to the motherboard manufacturer as to which way they wire the board (with DDR3 or DDR4 slots or a mix of both). As far as I understand there is currently not a significant difference between high-end DDR3 and low-end DDR4 in terms of day-to-day usage, though synthetic benchmarks and software that is memory intensive may show some larger differences. If you are not using the iGPU, I don't think it will make that much of a difference either way in daily usage. The benefit of DDR4 controllers on a mainstream platform is that RAM prices should start coming down for DDR4. Hopefully we will see something much more manageable in the not-too-distant future.
 
Just klike the old days with the old 440LX that supported both sdram and edo ram. ;)
 
If I have to buy ram anyway then ofc there is no point in DDR3. But if I'm buying DDR4 then why would I go with skylake? Then 5820k seems a better way to me. 6 cores will still wipe the floor with skylake's four.
 
M76 said:
If I have to buy ram anyway then ofc there is no point in DDR3. But if I'm buying DDR4 then why would I go with skylake? Then 5820k seems a better way to me. 6 cores will still wipe the floor with skylake's four.
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Depends on the workload. Especially if skylake has a signifigant oc headroom
 
obiwansotti said:
Depends on the workload. Especially if skylake has a signifigant oc headroom
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6 cores is 50% more than 4 I don't think there is any workload where skylake is 50% faster / thread to make up for that difference.
 
M76 said:
6 cores is 50% more than 4 I don't think there is any workload where skylake is 50% faster / thread to make up for that difference.
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Single threaded workloads.

DX11 games.


Also since it's about 10% faster clock for clock, it only needs to have about 35% faster clock speed. So if your haswell-E clock out at 4.2 and skylake is 5ghz it'll be a pretty narrow margin.

And it will be much faster on every single threaded task. There are more single threaded tasks than you might realize.
 
obiwansotti said:
Single threaded workloads.

DX11 games.


Also since it's about 10% faster clock for clock, it only needs to have about 35% faster clock speed. So if your haswell-E clock out at 4.2 and skylake is 5ghz it'll be a pretty narrow margin.

And it will be much faster on every single threaded task. There are more single threaded tasks than you might realize.
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In games the choke point is the GPU, you can game perfectly with a 4 core I5, the only place where you'd notice a difference is in benchmarks.

I don't really care about single threaded tasks. I know there is a lot, but those are very little. I don't care if it finishes in 100ms or 120ms. Anything that demands lots of cpu time will be multi-threaded. Like video encoding, compression, or rendering. That's what I'm interested in.
 
Lots of very demanding games do not use the GPU 100% and have the CPU pegged, a recent example is ARMA 3.
 
M76 said:
In games the choke point is the GPU, you can game perfectly with a 4 core I5, the only place where you'd notice a difference is in benchmarks.

I don't really care about single threaded tasks. I know there is a lot, but those are very little. I don't care if it finishes in 100ms or 120ms. Anything that demands lots of cpu time will be multi-threaded. Like video encoding, compression, or rendering. That's what I'm interested in.
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:eek:

If you are talking about video encoding, compression, or rendering or other properly multi-threaded application then that's fine.

But gaming, Not so much. There are only a handful of games that will use more threads than what an i7 skylake has to offer. Remember that a 5820k is haswell, not broadwell. So you are 2 gens back. Broadwell-e is not coming until q1 2016 and skylake-e may be q4 2016 or 2017
 
We may not see Broadwell-E.

As to the OP, there isn't much of a choice, you could either spend more on a motherboard that supports DDR3 (they will price gouge you) or spend money on a new set of memory.

Trust me, every gen we go through the same thing. When DDR1 came out everyone panic'd at how expensive it was but when it became mainstream it plummeted in price. Same with DDR2 and DDR3.
 
I've had a motherboard with both DDR1 + DDR2 slots, and PCIE + AGP too. The ASRock 775Dual-VSTA, if I remember correctly. That was a really cheap way to wing it during the transition period.

I'm hoping for something similar now.
 
Trimlock said:
We may not see Broadwell-E.

As to the OP, there isn't much of a choice, you could either spend more on a motherboard that supports DDR3 (they will price gouge you) or spend money on a new set of memory.

Trust me, every gen we go through the same thing. When DDR1 came out everyone panic'd at how expensive it was but when it became mainstream it plummeted in price. Same with DDR2 and DDR3.
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Wrong, I didn't panic when ddr1 was released and i am the very prone to panic type.
 
doug_7506 said:
:eek:

If you are talking about video encoding, compression, or rendering or other properly multi-threaded application then that's fine.

But gaming, Not so much. There are only a handful of games that will use more threads than what an i7 skylake has to offer. Remember that a 5820k is haswell, not broadwell. So you are 2 gens back. Broadwell-e is not coming until q1 2016 and skylake-e may be q4 2016 or 2017
Click to expand...

Broadwell is 14nm Haswell with a much improved iGPU. It really isn't a generational jump in performance over Haswell except in iGPU performance, so a 5820K isn't really 2 generations old.
 
Well I've just found this mainboard while browsing.
GIGABYTE GA-Z170-HD3 DDR3

It has four DDR3 memory slots. So does this mean Skylake actually supports normal DDR3 memory, and not just DDR3L? As there is no mention of DDR3L anywhere in the specifications, or in the manual (I've checked).
 
DDR3L is exactly the same as regular DDR3 but it works at 1.35v instead of 1.5v -- there is no command or signal differences.

Although, I would be wary of using 1.5v DDR3 in a skylake system. Remember in the past Intel has warned against using 1.65v ram on previous i7 platforms before, (saying to stick with 1.5v) -- and 1.35v is pretty close to 1.2v of DDR4.

So if you have DDR3 that works fine at 1.35v (Like Samsung wonder ram, and several others) then you're probably fine.

As a side note, it means that the skylake memory controller is probably fine with 1.35-1.4v for DDR4 ... hrrmm :) But yeah, in any case I would not go above 1.4v for vDIMM on skylake -- regardless of the memory tech used.
 
extide said:
DDR3L is exactly the same as regular DDR3 but it works at 1.35v instead of 1.5v -- there is no command or signal differences.

Although, I would be wary of using 1.5v DDR3 in a skylake system. Remember in the past Intel has warned against using 1.65v ram on previous i7 platforms before, (saying to stick with 1.5v) -- and 1.35v is pretty close to 1.2v of DDR4.

So if you have DDR3 that works fine at 1.35v (Like Samsung wonder ram, and several others) then you're probably fine.

As a side note, it means that the skylake memory controller is probably fine with 1.35-1.4v for DDR4 ... hrrmm :) But yeah, in any case I would not go above 1.4v for vDIMM on skylake -- regardless of the memory tech used.
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Do you have any source for that? What "previous i7 platforms"
And if 1.5V DDR3 wouldn't work with Skylake it should be listed as a compatibility note by the motherboard manufacturers. Also what do you base this don'T go over 1.4V on? Pure conjecture it seems to me. What would happen if I go over? Now I'm tempted to buy one of these just to prove that it works.
 
M76 said:
Do you have any source for that? What "previous i7 platforms"
And if 1.5V DDR3 wouldn't work with Skylake it should be listed as a compatibility note by the motherboard manufacturers. Also what do you base this don'T go over 1.4V on? Pure conjecture it seems to me. What would happen if I go over? Now I'm tempted to buy one of these just to prove that it works.
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In the past it was possible to cause damage to the memory controller by running memory with a higher voltage than the specification defined by Intel. Technically, they supported 1.5V DDR3 starting with the last of the Core 2 generation, but most people didn't start using DDR3 until the Core i series. Most of those chips ran 1.65V DDR3 just fine, but there was always the possibility that it could damage something, so people recommended following the Intel specification. I imagine it is the same with these chips (also, hardcore overclockers don't like to be limited by specifications and will probably exceed the spec anyway).
 
So ASUS released the approved memory list for their DDR3 Z170 board, and they list a ton of 1.65V memory modules. Plus anandtech did a performance comparison between DDR3 and DDR4, and it seems the differences are minuscule.

After this I see absolutely no reason to spend the extra money on new RAM.
 
M76 said:
So ASUS released the approved memory list for their DDR3 Z170 board, and they list a ton of 1.65V memory modules. Plus anandtech did a performance comparison between DDR3 and DDR4, and it seems the differences are minuscule.

After this I see absolutely no reason to spend the extra money on new RAM.
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I agree IF you already have DDR3 lying around anyway. If you have to buy new anyway, I'd go with DDR4 as the price isn't THAT different currently. I sold all my DDR3 in February
 
mls1995 said:
I agree IF you already have DDR3 lying around anyway. If you have to buy new anyway, I'd go with DDR4 as the price isn't THAT different currently. I sold all my DDR3 in February
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I agree, but if I were to buy DDR4, then I'd buy 2011-3 and 5820K instead.
 
MrCaffeineX said:
In the past it was possible to cause damage to the memory controller by running memory with a higher voltage than the specification defined by Intel. Technically, they supported 1.5V DDR3 starting with the last of the Core 2 generation, but most people didn't start using DDR3 until the Core i series. Most of those chips ran 1.65V DDR3 just fine, but there was always the possibility that it could damage something, so people recommended following the Intel specification. I imagine it is the same with these chips (also, hardcore overclockers don't like to be limited by specifications and will probably exceed the spec anyway).
Click to expand...

While Intel can bitch and moan about "not exceeding 1.X DDR3 voltage" all they want, the fact is that the DDR3 JEDEC standard (which Intel agreed to conform to) states that DDR3 can operate at a voltage of up to 1.9V...The CPU's MC is supposed to adhere to the standards of the governing body, in this case JEEDEC...

Now, thanks to advancements in DRAM processes, there were new DDR3 1.5V and DDR3L (low voltage) standards of 1.5V and 1.35V, respectively set in 2013 I believe...It seems as if Intel decided to make SkyLake the first desktop CPU that shared it's mobile SKU's brethren's requirement for DDR3L..

Despite this, Skylake seems to handle 1.5V+ DDR3 Dimms without a problem.
 
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