DDR2 Memory latency performance with nForce 680i SLI chipset

Recently published an article titled “DDR2 Memory Frequency Performance” which looked at the value of high speed memory. The reason I found the need to write such an article was to demonstrate that there really is no need to try and overclock your memory when pushing a Core 2 Duo processor to the max. Often readers complain about poor Core 2 Duo overclocking performance and 99% of the time it comes down to memory instability at higher frequencies. This article showed that when running a Core 2 Duo E6700 on a 500MHz FSB, DDR2-667 was just as fast as DDR2-1181 memory and in some cases even faster.
The point of the DDR2 Memory Frequency Performance article was to prove that when overclocking, the 1:1 ratio is not important and we proved this with the 1066MHz configuration. Moving on, there were a few good suggestions made by readers about the first article that they would have liked to have seen. That being a broader range of memory timings, not just memory frequencies, so it could be determined whether low-latency DDR2-800 memory for example, was really required. While this kind of testing could have been done with DDR2-533 or even DDR2-667 memory, we chose DDR2-800 memory as it is the more popular choice. Furthermore, the price difference between these three standards is often very minimal.

Therefore the DDR2-800 memory was tested with CAS 3-3-3-8 T1, CAS 4-4-4-12 T1, CAS 4-4-4-12 T2, CAS 5-5-5-15 T2 and even CAS 6-6-6-18 T2 timings. This time all the testing was done on the ASUS Striker Extreme which uses the Nvidia nForce 680i SLI chipset with the Core 2 Duo E6700 processor clock at its default operating frequency. Again this is primarily gaming related and not a general usage article, since high-speed expensive memory is generally associated with gaming!
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