ddr2 800 or ddr3 1333

[distantthunder]

curently i have a dell optiplex 755 sff with ddr2 pc2-6400 800mhz 6gb ram installed. my new processor is the Q9550. my question is this. would i be better the way i am even though i cannot install more ram than 8gb and no other hard drive. or go for a dell optiplex 780 mini tower which i have seen can take my new CPU and has ddr3 1333mhz with a max 16gb

any improvement between ddr2 800 to ddr3 1333 with would match the CPU bus of 1333mhz. not wanting to do a new build yet till i see how the successor of kabylake would be. thank in advance

Distant thunder

 

[Quarkzquarkz]

Well in real world situations the difference in performance is negligible at best unless you're running strict benchmarking. In other words, you wouldn't see a significant increase in performance from a ddr2 800 to ddr3 1333 mhz. If you're only concerned with maxing out your memory from 8gb to 16gb I suppose you could, but I believe it would be a waste of money because you can use that same money to simply upgrade your video card and possibly your storage to an SSD as well. Good luck!

 

[Deleted member 217926]

The Core2 architecture can't take advantage of DDR3 speeds as it was designed for DDR2. DDR3 was becoming the new standard when the later Core2 chips were released so motherboard manufacturers started making DDR3 boards just due to cost. I'd advise that spending any money at all on tech that old is just wasting it. You can get an i3 6100, a cheap motherboard and 8GB of DDR4 for a little over $200 and that will run circles around your Q9550.

 

[distantthunder]

thanks Quarkzquarkz.... so can you tell me for the dell 755 sff am i getting the best performance from my q9550 if its FSB is 1333 and the q35 chipset is 1333 supported but memory max is 800mhz? .... the dell 780 tower uses a q45 chipset. so im wondering is this even better.

 

[distantthunder]

The Core2 architecture can't take advantage of DDR3 speeds as it was designed for DDR2. DDR3 was becoming the new standard when the later Core2 chips were released so motherboard manufacturers started making DDR3 boards just due to cost. I'd advise that spending any money at all on tech that old is just wasting it. You can get an i3 6100, a cheap motherboard and 8GB of DDR4 for a little over $200 and that will run circles around your Q9550.

thanks for the info. my old core2duo e7300 i had when i upgraded to the q9550 i did see a little boost of response, but i did see that dell 780 did support the q9550 but had ddr3 instead. so i was wondering if the ddr3 1333 is better than ddr2 800 with more responding to cpu instructions

 

[Deleted member 217926]

Nope. Core2 does best with a 1:1 FSB/RAM ratio. So a Q9550 which has multiplier of 8.5 x 333 FSB = 2.83Ghz. Since the RAM is DDR or double data rate the true speed is half the effective speed since DDR transmits info on both the rising and falling edges of the clock cycle.

So the Q9550 has a 333Mhz FSB and DDR2 667 has a true speed of 333Mhz ( 667 is effective ) that makes DDR2 667 optimal for a stock speed Q9550. If you overclock the Q9550 you might want DDR2 800 since overclocking will also increase the RAM speed.

That may or may not make sense but trust me I overclocked more Core2 systems than anything else over the years.