It’s been a while, mainly due to the fact that I was drowned in The Burning Crusade - the expansion to World of Warcraft

My friend pop me a question the other day, which DDR2 should he get for his spanking new Core 2 Duo system. If it’s AMD I would automatically say fastest possible cause with the built in memory controller, you take full advantage of memory speed regardless of your FSB. But thing is a little bit different with Intel, it actually runs best with synchronized setup, as in FSB = RAM. Intel is using quad pump hence when it says 1066MhZ it actually means 266MhZ x4. So a DDR2 533 will be what you’re looking for since it’s 266MhZx2 to have it synchronized. After much explaining I got lazy and pointed him to an article in Madshrimps to get a better understanding of things.

You think that’ll make DDR2 667/800 unpopular ? Not exactly. As you know us with minor technical knowledge also love to squeeze every ounce of performance out of the stuff we pay with our hard earned money, DDR2 667 is a nice choice where you can keep FSB:RAM synchronous and do some overclocking on the very overclockable C2D. DDR2 800 on the other hand actually runs the best eventhough you’re not overclocking because the memory speed is now that much higher that it compensates for the loss of running asynchronous . Conclusively:

Not Rich + Not overclocking = DDR2 533
Not Rich + Overclocking = DDR2 667
Rich + Not overclocking = DDR2 800
Rich + OverClocking = Whatever you can get your hands on at high price .. DDR2 1066 ?