Our recent article on DDR3 memory performance called DDR3 SDRAM: Revolution or Evolution??we have clearly demonstrated how promising the new technology actually is. The currently existing DDR3 SDRAM modules already can ensure pretty decent performance of contemporary platforms. Although this type of memory features somewhat higher latency than the widely spread DDR2 SDRAM, its higher working frequency that today reaches up to 1600MHz ensures higher bandwidth, which can make up for the latency. Taking into account almost the same performance of systems built with DDR2-1067 and DDR3-1333 SDRAM, we can conclude that DDR3-1600 will ensure higher performance. However, it important to remember that clocking the memory subsystem of contemporary platforms at frequency above 1333MHz is only possible with FSB overclocking, which may limit the public interest towards this high-speed memory. Nevertheless, it will hardly discourage most hardware enthusiasts, because many of them do work with overclocked systems anyway. And it means that DDR3 SDRAM is finally turning from useless rare novelty into a truly efficient solution that is worth your consideration.
However, even though we can now find convincing arguments in favor of the transition to DDR3, we shouldn't forget that there is always another side to the picture. One of the most crucial factors that prevent the new type of memory from becoming very popular is its high price that is more than twice as high as that of the DDR2 SDRAM. And far not everyone is ready to pay that much for the few percents of performance advantage.
Despite this fact, it is definitely too early to give up on DDR3 SDRAM yet. High price of this memory type has pure marketing origins. The manufacturers and resellers raise the DDR3 prices on purpose, because they are new solutions for the computer market and aren't widely spread yet. So after a while the price of DDR3 SDRAM modules should inevitably drop down to at least the level of DDR2 SDRAM thus letting much broader user group to improve the performance of their platforms by switching to the new memory standard.
Unfortunately, the transition from DDR2 SDRAM to newer DDR3 memory will require a platform upgrade in most cases. New memory uses lower voltage and slightly different signal protocol that is why DDR2 and DDR3 SDRAM modules are logically incompatible and are not interchangeable. However, some of the mainboard makers came up with a great solution to this problem. Among the existing mainboards for Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad processors there are solutions supporting both memory types at the same time, as they carry onboard memory slots for DDR2 and DDR3 modules.
These mainboards are only based on the new Intel P35 chipset. This is the only chipset today that not only supports the upcoming Penryn processor family, but also features a universal memory controller than can work with both: DDR2 and DDR3 SDRAM. Some of the leading mainboard makers ?Asus and Gigabyte in the first place - are currently offering a hardware implementation of this feature. Their solutions allow using inexpensive DDR2 SDRAM until the market situation changes, and then transition to the new memory type without any additional financial investments into the platform.
However, ?hybrid?mainboards like that, which can work with two memory types, have never been really popular among computer users. The thing is that they usually failed to offer high level of performance. As a rule, the manufacturers had to sacrifice some internal chipset optimizations for the sake of this universality. At least, this is what it used to be like: take, for instance, Intel 915P based hybrid mainboards that used to work with DDR1 and DDR2 SDRAM at the same time. But will the history repeat itself this time when we are talking about Intel P35 based mainboards?
To answer this question we decided to take a closer look at a new generation hybrid mainboard. We picked Gigabyte P35C-DS3R. This mainboard is going to be the main hero of our today's article, where we will discuss the main features of this solution and study its performance with DDR2 and DDR3 SDRAM.
