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Whether or not the author was really serious, I think about the only really worthwhile comments of his might have been related to the "uncertain economy".

Right now, all too many people I know are finding themselves out of jobs, with no good-paying alternatives in sight. I just attended my girlfriend's college graduation ceremony yesterday afternoon, and the guy sitting behind us was a 40-something year old who decided to go back to school last semester, because he couldn't make it anymore in the construction business. He said he worked in construction for 18 years, and until 3 years ago, it was a good career for him. But in the last few years, things have gotten so bad, many people are resorting to selling off the trucks and equipment they used in their trade, just to keep the bills paid and to stay afloat. They're seeing their work dwindle to the point where they can do it as a side job, but can't guarantee they're always busy. Therefore, he finally decided to go back to school and start a new career path.

My g/f is in a similar dilemma. Here is she. fresh out of school with a degree in psychology, and really can't do a thing with it except continue on to earn a Masters' in psych. After that, she could open her own practice (MORE $'s on top of huge student loan debt!), or possibly partner with someone else - with results varying depending on what part of the country you decide to live in. She's thinking about going for a double major, with the 2nd. one in business .... because at least the internships for MBAs seem plentiful and promising right now.

Anyway ... my point is, most people just aren't going to be as "free" with their spending money as they were when they were sure their good-paying job was there for them. Playing with stuff like DDR3 vs. DDR2 amounts to "unnecessary entertainment" for the computer hobbyist, really. You can get a plenty fast PC running regular old DDR2 memory that will do whatever you need done. Buying into anything else, just for the sake of "overclocking" amounts to tinkering and computer hot-rodding for the fun of benchmarking and seeing how high a number you can get. It's not a practical activity when finances are uncertain or possibly very limited.

The author of this article seems to think that since 1.5V is 17% less than 1.8, the power savings are 17%. Granted, the saving is more like 31% if the memory has the same resistance, since power usage is proportional to the square of the voltage, but it's not worth reading an article from someone who doesn't know such basic knowledge that is so relevant to the topic being written about.

I really like ECC memory. I've built a lot of machines here and there for various purposes and people and can safely say that ECC should be mandated. People oft talk of blue screens, panics, etc. A lot of these are due to bad memory. And these types of errors can often be hard to replicate. I believe EETimes had an article about how bad bad memory is.

Anyhow, I'm on a 975X chipset with 4GB of DDR2 800 MHZ unbuffered ECC memory machine now. Not a single unforced error since I bought this machine and assembled it December, 2006. Nothing. This unit is primarily a gaming rig, the 3DMark 2006 score is 11500 with an 8800GTX, all with ECC memory.

The most irritating thing for me is, looking at the great new CPUs available, is the utter lack of any unbuffered ECC memory in the DDR3 range. This to me is unacceptable. I refuse to compromise so I will wait. Intel has a motherboard featuring DDR2 800 fully buffered memory for the 'high end workstation' , D5400XS, this is $600+. Supermicro offers something similar.

The X38 does DDR2 ECC, and for whatever reason the X48 took that away. I don't get why Intel wants to deny us DDR3 unbuffered ECC? Its really a selling point, a very good thing. If you overclock, its nice to have because it can tell you the limits minus the guesswork, not that I would bother with OC personally.

Fundamentally, without ECC, do you even know if the memory works at all? My experience leads me to believe that without ECC present, the answer is no at all.

I came here to say the same thing. The whole article can only be called a theoretical comparison between DDR2 & DDR3, as there is not a single benchmark that compares the two. Where is the latency, bandwidth, power consumption, etc charts for DDR2 & DDR3 when running at similar clock speeds? The author says that people are taking the latency increase too seriously, and that it doesn't come into play, but then under the "downside" discussion, they mention the latency. Also, when all the arguments they use preface concepts with "in theory" or "should" kinda makes you think they're just making this stuff up. I'm still waiting for an AM2+ chipset that will support DDR3, as the Phenoms (I think) have a memory controller that supports it. That should give the AMD chips a boost when compared to the current crop of Intel chips as the on-chip memory controller should allow for better usage of the RAM, but again, I'll wait until a benchmark confirms it. Intel motherboards, at least to me, seem to be 2-3x as costly as AMD varieties, and don't always offer the same BIOS flexibility. Not to mention the top-end Intel chips are 2x as much as the top-end AMD chips, and I still prefer AMD over Intel when building my own systems.

He's like a jet engine supporter immediately after World War II:

"Jet engines are inherrently capable of much greater speeds than propeller engines!"

"OK, so show me one that goes much faster than the prop driven spitfire?"

"Well, uh, there's the Gloster Meteor!"

"It does about 500mph*, right? That's not bad compared to the Spitfire XIX's 460mph. But there are tons of Spitfires out there, available cheaply vs. paying several times the cost for the Meteor for about a 10% speed improvement." *note: F-3 variant, not the "overclocked" tweaked versions that set speed records.

"Well, but the point isn't that it's better today. It's a better technology! It'll be better in the future! Props will never go supersonic. Jets can potentially go several times supersonic."

"That is cool. Doesn't really help me today though, does it? I'm still paying several times the cost for a small improvement, today."

"Yeah, but if you don't buy jets now, how will their prices ever come down? How will we ever reach the heady perfection they're capable of?"

"Again, not helping me today, is it?"

"But! But! It's really cool!"

Yes, the technology shows promise. But its future promise with only small increases today doesn't justify its current high cost.

If more people bought it, the cost would come down over time and more investment would mean unlocking more of that promise. Which is great in the future but gives you very little today in exchange for that high cost.

The argument he seems to be making is that everyone should adopt it right now, not because it actually gets them much for their money but because their investment will enable him to buy even faster stuff for a lower price later.

Not really compelling.

Exactly. I'm not buying a product whose only real advantage comes when you void the warranty.

And to take it even further, that's just the cost of memory. A quick NewEgg search for DDR3 motherboard came up with a whopping 10 boards. The cheapest are 150 for open box items. The typical price is over 300.

Maybe DDR3 is the memory industries way of keeping people on 32-bit OS's interested in their product? Because you can't really use much more than 2GB in a 32 bit system, and that's selling for about $50 now for DDR2 (I paid over $300 a year and a half ago!).

If you want real performance improvement get a 64 bit OS and 8GB DDR2 instead of 2GB DDR3. It will probably cost less and you'll notice the performance improvement as fewer accesses to HD (given you're OS knows how to pre-fetch intelligently).

Sorry, just wanted to append some details:

- We were using XP Pro x64 edition
- I believe there was 4GB RAM, possibly 8GB
- I tested exactly the same program that we wrote and compile with the same input data and timed it between the DDR2 and DDR3 machines.
- The processing took exactly the same number of seconds on both platforms. (Approx 20sec). Testing on older Xeon 3.6 gave me approx 50sec, and Pentium D-3.2 at 30 seconds.