Should You Jump on the AM3 Bandwagon?

Should You Jump on the AM3 Bandwagon?

Roydon Cerejo, May 15, 2009 1730 hrs IST

With AMD launching AM3 processors, is it the right time to switch to DDR3?

Great performance, won't cost you an arm and a leg (processors), higher memory bandwidth

No major improvement over DDR2

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With AM3 motherboards starting to trickle in and AMD throwing out good performing and affordable Phenom II's, it won't be long before DDR3 memory goes mainstream. While the graphics card industry has moved on to GDDR5, it will be sometime before we get desktop DDR3 memory down at today's DDR2 rates. AMD and Intel are both pushing hard for DDR3 memory and when OEM manufacturers start adopting it in their systems on a large scale we may see some improvement in the pricing.

With the Phenom II processor comes the new Dragon platform, which is a combination of the 790GX/FX based motherboard, Phenom II processor and a 48xx series graphics card. It basically is a system with AMD/ATI components. To complete the platform, we have a couple of software like Overdrive, which lets you monitor and tweak all the components, and Fusion, which is an application that helps boost gaming performance by closing unnecessary background processes.

The ideal comparison for the Dragon platform would be Intel's latest Corei7 platform since they are both DDR3 only systems. Since Intel is always running out of review samples (for reasons best known to them), comparing the Dragon with the older LGA775 would not be fair, so instead we decided to compare it with AMD's older AM2+ socket, which is DDR2 only, to see just how much of a difference the DDR3 memory really makes with the newer Phenom II's.