You and a coworker are discussing the relative merits of DDR

You and a coworker are discussing the relative merits of DDR2 vs. DDR3, and specifically DDR2-667 against DDR3-1600. You believe the faster DDR3 is always faster, while your coworker says that latency due to greater power consumption actually makes DDR3-1600 modules slower than DDR2-667 memory. Your supervisor comes along to try to settle the dispute. What does he say is true of DDR2 and DDR3?

A. He says DDR3-1600 will always be faster than DDR2-667 because of the faster clock speeds.

B. He says DDR2-667 will always be faster than DDR3-1600 because DDR3-1600 has greater latency due to greater energy consumption.

C. He says DDR2-667 modules run slower, not only because of the slower clock rate, but because at its clock speed, it consumes more power than the DDR3-1600 modules.

D. He says DDR3-1600 should be generally faster than DDR2-667 and run using less power, but that a variety of other factors could affect overall performance.

Solution

D. While you generally expect DDR3-1600 memory to run faster and cooler and use less power than a DDR2-667 memory module, there are a variety of factors that could affect overall performance. Benchmarking computer speeds is a complex task, and speed comparisons can be skewed one way or another, depending on how the tests are set up