Really, is DDR2 not as good as DDR3 and other ones??? I didn't think that 400mhz was that good or 8000mb/s. How do i know if it is running at its full potential, can RAM be underclocked or something similar to what they do with processors???
It seems the average DDR2-800 (PC6400) score is between 5000 and 7000MB/s, anything higher than 7500MB/s can be considered a more-than-decent speed.. If you want something in the 5-digit range (10000+), you'll need something like the DDR2-1066 (PC8500) in dual channel.
Keep in mind that although it's nice to have nice high scores for the memory access speed, your PC will still be restricted in certain ways by other hardware (HDD, CPU, etc). For motherboards that only take DDR2, because of the other hardware you'll probably never really benefit from DDR3-class speeds anyway...
Anyways, in case anybody's interested, the Phenom II x3 740 BE that I bought doesn't like my motherboard, so I made a plan with a friend of mine to upgrade his PC and allow me to take his old CPU. So I still got a slight upgrade (5400+ to 6000+), but I can't clock this 6000+ at 200MHz core like my old proc... So my memory assessment speed is down from about 8600/8700MB/s to about 8300MB/s now.
You should also keep in mind that it's a combination of components that determines how well your RAM runs; while more components do affect it, for AMDs it's more a "CPU/RAM" thing, for Intels it's more a "Motherboard/RAM" situation.
