What's faster? A Single channel DDR3 or a dual channel DDR2?

Question

I wonder if Dual Channel DDR2 is faster than Single Channel DDR3 or that DDR3 is so much faster that the Dual Channel doesn't matter.

Solution

The DDR3 is much faster, it's been proven (through testing) that dual channel does not offer a particularly large increase in preformance. Especially not enough to out weight the base line performance increase DDR3 has over DDR2. Toms hardware has a pretty nice breakdown of the modest performance difference between single and dual channel.

Comments

[tobylane]

"The primary benefit of DDR3 SDRAM over its predecessor, DDR2 SDRAM, is the ability to transfer at twice the data rate (8× the speed of its internal memory arrays)," I'd be interested which is better of 1x4 v 2x2 of the same type, e.g. DDR3.

[Ivo Flipse]

Well, unless you can show me a motherboard that supports both and a compelling reason not to choose DDR3, this question is kind of pointless...

[David Schwartz]

Under those same test conditions, the performance difference between DDR3 and DDR2 would be even more modest.