I have managed to find this paragraph from a wiki article which
I vaguely remember reading it a few months ago. It says that for
Quads, 533 is actually better than 667 as it matches the FSB
speed.
Unlike the previous Pentium 4 and Pentium D design, the Core 2
technology sees a greater benefit from memory running synchronously
with the Front Side Bus (FSB). This means that for the Conroe CPUs
with FSB of 1066 MT/s, the ideal memory speed for DDR2 is PC2-4200
or PC2-8500 (twice the speed of PC2-4200). In some configurations,
using PC2-5300 can actually decrease performance. Only when going
to PC2-6400 is there a significant performance increase. While
expensive DDR2 memory models with tighter timings do improve
performance, the difference in real world games and applications is
negligible.[48]
Optimally, the memory bandwidth afforded should match the bandwidth
of the FSB closely. The AGTL+ PSB used by all NetBurst processors
as well as current and medium-term (pre-QuickPath) Core 2
processors provide a 64-bit data path. Current chipsets provide for
two DDR or two DDR2 channels.
**Table**
On jobs requiring large amounts of memory access, the quad-core
Core 2 processors can benefit significantly[49] from using a
PC2-8500 memory, which runs exactly twice as fast as the FSB; this
is not an officially supported configuration, but a number of
motherboards offer it.
The Core 2 processor does not require the use of DDR2. While the
Intel 975X and P965 chipsets require this memory, some motherboards
and chipsets support both the Core 2 and DDR memory. When using DDR
memory, performance may be reduced because of the lower available
memory bandwidth.
But then, it says this:
Only when going to PC2-6400 is there a significant performance
increase.
So does it mean that if I'm getting Q6600 soon, I should go
ahead with DDR2-800 instead? Is anyone able to comment on this
article?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q6600#Synchronous_memory_modules
