Originally posted by: jc9970
Originally posted by: Philippine Mango
Originally posted by: jc9970
Define what you consider *upgrade*. Say the OP goes with AM2. A year later, (example) AM30 is out and he wants to upgrade. Sadly, his current cpu, and motherboard isn't compatible, so hes forced to *replace*. And most likely, he will want to replace his card with something newer. How is this considered an upgrade path?
Then it would equally suck and not matter but last I checked, I knew about Socket AM2 (formally M2) at least back in July '05 but IIRC I heard about M2 as early as february '05... The next progressive socket change shouldn't be until at least mid '07 to '08....
That's just your own speculation. I remember when everyone was jumping on the socket 754 bandwagon and everyone was going nuts for it. Couple months later, they announce the release of the all new 939 socket. The socket that was to become the standard for all future processors. And what do ya know, a couple months later, they announce a new socket. The fact of the matter is, technology is constantly changing. Will we ever have a standard? I don't think so. It all comes down to how long you plan to keep your build.
Yes but the reason why for the change was not because of the pin out for the processor, but to support DDR2. AT LEAST if the OP had gotten a Socket AM2 based system, then the OP could use his old DDR2 memory in the next build..[/quote]
As you said, DDR2 sucks. So if he were to go with AM2, he wouldn't have a choice but to go with $hitty DDR2 memory. And when he does decide to upgrade, I'm more then positive that he would want to upgrade to better DDR2 memory. So once again, we're replacing.
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But then as time went on, even better DDR2 memory would be available and all he'd have to do is upgrade to better DDR2 memory and CPU (assuming he needs a faster processor). Look at it this way, the next time he upgrades, it will be more than likely that he will NOT be getting the best DDR2 memory but more of the equivalent of DDR 2700 and not 3200 (think of that time period) while as of this moment, he'd be getting PC 2100, so an upgrade from 2100 to 3200 would be more worthwhile than an upgrade from 2700 to 3200.... See what I'm saying?
Oh, and heres something I and I don't believe anybody has thought about yet...
Because AMD has an integrated memory controller, it doesn't matter if it's low latency or high latency since it has little impact on performance. Thats one advantage of having an integrated memory controller, high latency memory won't hurt performance nearly as much as on intel systems. So it doesn't really matter anyways.. Only time he'd need or anybody else need better memory if you were 1. Overclocking and the memory was holding you back and 2. Upgrading the processor to one that requires memory with higher bandwidth..
BTW, Thats what I remember from reading an anandtech benchmark with tight memory timings and relaxed memory timings that there was little performance difference..