DDR2 RAM has reached its maximum limit, supporting 1066 million data
transfers per second with a peak transfer rate of 8,500 Gbps. But with new OSs
like Vista, 3D cards and gaming applications, there's demand for even higher
transfer speeds. That's why RAM manufacturers are coming out with DDR3 RAM. We
received a pair of 1 GB modules of Kingston's latest HyperX DDR3 RAM They have
blue colored heat spreaders that work quite well, preventing the RAM from
overheating. The modules support 1.9 GHz frequency, and we tested them in dual
mode on a PC with an Intel Core2Duo E6750 2.66 GHz processor, an Asus P5k3
Deluxe motherboard, and ATI Radeon X1950XTX 512 MB graphics card. We ran PCMark
05, which does a series of read, write, copy and latency tests with a varying
load of 16 MB to 4 KB. The RAM modules scored 5851 PCMarks, which is quite
impressive considering the 5900 PCMarks scored by Kingston's DDR2 800 MHz RAM
modules we reviewed last year. This clearly indicates the performance that DDR3
RAM modules can achieve. This performance however, will come at the cost of
compatibility. They are incompatible with DDR2 RAM slots owing to their
different key notch location.
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Bottomline: Overall, these RAM modules
give excellent performance, but their cost is still on the higher side compared
to equivalent DDR2 modules.