DDR 3 Vs. DDR2 on new Mobo to get AHCI

[niggles]

Hi All,

I'm hoping this is the right place to put this I'm just a little confused as to whether this is the right place to post this or what I need to ask so I'm starting here. I currently have an MSI P6N Diamond with a Q6600. I wanted to get the benefit of an SSD. the mobo I have is the Nvidia 680i Chipset. There is no AHCI support and so I don't really get any benefit from going to an SSD. For that reason I wanted to switch chipsets. That put me on track to buy a Gigabyte EP45T-USB3P motherboard. This also gets me USB 3.0 which I think helps get me a little more up to date. Anyway, the new board is DDR3 and my old board was DDR2 800. From the bench marks I've looked at the 800 DDR2 is on par with DDR3 1333. I'm trying to work out if there is any benefit in getting DDR2200 over DDR 1333. I can't find any benchmarks and am hoping that someone here has some insight over whether this is worthwhile to go with DDR2200 or if I should just buy DDR1333.

 

[vailr]

There should still be available some P45 chipset boards that could re-use your DDR2 memory. Whether from Newegg or from some other source.
But you'd have better overclock ability with some faster rated DDR2 or going to some quality DDR3 + a DDR3 motherboard.
Whichever you decide, Gigabyte is usually an excellent choice for the board manufacturer.

 

[niggles]

yes, I'm married to getting a Gigabyte EP45T-USB3P , I'm just trying to work out if there's any difference on this board between using DDR3 1333 or DDR3 2200, it doesn't seem to be anywhere.

 

[vailr]

The last 10 or so pages of this thread has some user postings about the EP45T-USB3P board:
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=205132

 

[niggles]

I went through those 10 pages and each post is about over clocking RAM, I'm not sure what RAM that they're over clocking though. They talk about team 1300, I'm not sure if they mean 1333? It's not really clear though if DDR3 1333 is actually better to get than DDR3 2000 or DDR3 2200. Thanks for the help so far.

 

[Chiropteran]

I wanted to get the benefit of an SSD. the mobo I have is the Nvidia 680i Chipset. There is no AHCI support and so I don't really get any benefit from going to an SSD.

I'm a bit confused, why do think there is no benefit of using an SSD without AHCI?

AHCI primarily adds 2 features-

Hot swapping.
I doubt this is what you care about.

Native command queuing.
This is very useful on a spindle HDD because it allows the drive to access files that are close together in a more efficient order. On an SSD, the location of the files on the drives has zero impact on access time and there is no advantage in accessing files based on location.

Is there something else I'm missing? The benchmarks I have seen only show a slight difference in performance, and some SSD's actually warn you to NOT use AHCI mode.

 

[niggles]

The instructions I had essentially were "turn AHCI off", that was my first point. Perhaps my board doesn't even use AHCI based on what you're saying here. I'd installed the SSD, formatted and set it up but I see no difference in speed on start up. I think it is *I* that is missing something. I have looked around for settings on how best to set up the SSD in the Bios before installing Windows and that is the only consistent thing that all the papers I've seen on this so far. Perhaps I shouldn't of even bothered getting a new Mobo, I wonder if I'm not simply throwing money money at somethat that can't be fixed. I started this thread looking to find the benefits of getting faster RAM in real world applications, perhaps I should think bigger picture and try and figure out why the SSD isn't any faster on my current motherboard which is an MSI P6N Diamond.

 

[vailr]

I could be wrong, but isn't AHCI mode required for Trim support on SSD's?

 

[adamantinepiggy]

Microsoft's IDE drivers support trim in Win7 so you don't need AHCI for trim functionality with SSD's. The biggest benefit of AHCI over IDE for "SSD's", is NCQ and advanced power controlling commands not supported by IDE. NCQ has less an positive impact with SSD's as it does with spinner hard drives, but it still benefits SSD's because of the command queueing (the "C" and "Q" in NCQ).

That all being said, in normal "home" type above average use, unless you're running benchmarks, you wouldn't notice the difference in AHCI versus IDE performance with an SSD.

A good analogy is that it's easy to feel the speed difference between a 200hp and 400hp car (slow HD vs fast SSD). It's much less easy to feel the difference between a 400hp and 425hp car (fast SSD in IDE mode vs AHCI mode) unless you time it on the dragstrip (benchmark), and even with a faster dragstrip time from +25hp, it has no real bearing on how you use it driving to and from work in heavy traffic..