i am wondering if there is significant performance difference to justify the more expensive DDR3?

i am wondering if maybe, if i get DDR3 with less "size" to start with... like 2 x 1GB DDR3 1333 (~S$194) would it be better than 2 x 2GB DDR2 800 (~S$112) or even 2 x 1GB DDR2 1066 HyperX (~S$112)

iirc, you need to get really high frequency before DDR3 becomes worth it.

iirc, you need to get really high frequency before DDR3 becomes worth it.

y is it so? so i compare DDR2 & DDR3 and same frequency, eg. 1333MHz (if there is 1333 for DDR2 that is ...) the performance will be more or less the same?

At the same speeds DDR2 will be faster because of the higher latencies of DDR3.

so for now, what i see is DDR3 1333. is that enough to justify any performance difference?

also, as i see from the poll now, most says size of RAM is more important.

7 (87.5%) for amount of RAM. 1 (12.5%) for Frequency.

frequency is not that important? why? cos the bottleneck will be the FSB?

what is latency and how does it affect performance? its something like response time?

Like some people said before, DDR3 doesn't start to give any performance advantages before you reach pretty high speeds due to the higher latency. At 1333 it's probably a tie vs 800MHz DDR2 (depending on the actual latencies of both), but then again they also make faster DDR2.

Not only DDR3 is a LOT more expensive, but boards that use DDR3 are also pricier. The high-end DDR3 certainly has an edge over DDR2, but it comes at a price. And that slight gain in memory bandwidth doesn't translate in a much faster computer (there's loads of other bottlenecks left). Most people don't want to pay like $500 extra to have a ~1% speed gain because they use DDR3, especially when that same $500 could go a long ways to make everything faster (faster CPU, more/faster DDR2, faster HDs, RAID0, faster vid card for gamers, etc).

And yes, RAM amount is a LOT more important. Not enough RAM, and your system will have to page memory to disk, and that's SLOW (HDs are like 1000x slower than RAM). And having loads of RAM helps for certain other things, like pre-loading (caching) files in RAM in Vista's case (SuperFetch).

I'm currently using 4GB of RAM. And my clocks are, 5-5-5-18.

what do you mean by "will you" ? right now?

of course we all will eventually unless you dont plan on upgrading again until ddr4 is out..

and all of those features are important. having 4gb of high speed low latency ram is all important for me..

i highly suggest to get more than 2GB of ram with vista..

I won't use or purchase DDR3 until Nehalem is out on the consumer market.

8 GB ddr2 ram cl5-4-4-10 ddr960, memory works fine at 1200mhz even, but my motherboard/cpu doesnt seem to like speed above 1000mhz, cpu mostly it seems like.

latency butting under 40ns, 17ns faster then old ddr2 ram i had (and its 4 sticks)

Not sure... I voted DDR2 But I still have just DDR. But I heard that DDR2 is pretty darn good.