ddr 3 or ddr5??

hi......i was about to buy acer 8942G ....it has i7 720qm.......8gb ram ......and ati 5850 which supports direct x 11 .......but it is ddr 3...............being a ddr3 ,is it a really big draw back for it or it will perform good in modern games like cod mow2,gta iv,prototype,assassin creed II and crysis?????????plzzzzz help...is ddr3 just not good enough?

 

Not good enough. GDDR3 has half the throughput of GDDR5 with the same bus width, for example:
-5850 with GDDR5 on 128-bit bus, clocked at 1000MHz, will have throughput of 64GB/s
-5850 with GDDR3 on 128-bit bus, clocked at 1000MHz, will have throughput of 32GB/s
GDDR3 will cripple this card.

 

It would play those games, but doesn't have the bandwidth of ddr5

 

I'd just like to point out that (G)DDR3 or (G)DDR5, are completely different standards than DDR3. GDDR is SGRAM not SDRAM, where the SG is Synchronous Graphics, and SD is Synchronous Dynamic. So many people blur the lines that it gets confusing really quick. $.02

 

If you want to know how it will perform, look for Mobility 5830 benchmarks.

 

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3dmark06 scores:

HD 5830: 7730

HD 5850: 9949

Averages

 

Yes, but the 5850 average contains data from users with both GDDR3 and GDDR5.

Or is that your point?

 

Then we'd need to know what CPUs were involved. I'm sure most of the 5830 tests would be with a Core i5 equipped Envy 15.

P.S. - 3DMark06 is worthless.

 

Either way, the 5850 + GDDR3 is only marginally faster than the 5830. It's really not as good as it could be.

That said, the 5830 is still a pretty impressive card. It'll play most current games on pretty decent settings at 1920x1080. I can play SCII at High at 1920x1080, which ain't too bad.

 

IMO , the GDDR5 card will be much better than the GDDR3 card.. simply , u can play on higher res and details...

 

That's because some manufacturers use DDR2 SDRAM on their GPUs to save money, and non-technical salespeople then start referring to GDDR3 as DDR3 or the fact that some ATI cards also use DDR3 SDRAM...

 

You definitely want something with GDDR5, GDDR3 or DDR3 will hold it back so much. And AFAIK there is no DDR5, it's just a misnomer from people saying "DDR3" in place of GDDR3, so they readily assume GDDR5 and DDR5 would be the same much like GDDR3 and DDR3. Personally I think it was retarded on ATi's part to allow GDDR3/DDR3 compatibility for anything above the 5730. Yeah, people will be misinformed and buy it, only to be disappointed......everything above the 5650 should've been GDDR5 standard.

 

Some real world examples would be great... 3dmark is great, but wont give us a decent example of gameplay. I'd love to see a system show FPS of gameplay.

I'm sure gddr5 wins over gddr3 but how much of a difference can it make?

 

It makes a huge difference. GDDR5 doubles the data rate over GDDR3. It effectively makes a 128-bit GDDR5 card perform like a 256-bit GDDR3 card. You can find lots of FPS comparisons around the forum and Google.

 

basically , if u have a 5850 GDDR3 and 5850 GDDR5 , u can play on double the details or even max details compared the the DDR3 card..