DDR3 important?

I was considering getting this laptop:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834220577

It has 4 gb of what I found out is DDR2, not DDR3 RAM.

What are the implications of this on my performance, on how future-proofed the laptop is, and whether or not I should purchase the product?

I'm a gamer and going to college, so those will be the two areas in which my laptop will be performing.

Thanks.

 

I believe that DDR3 just uses less power. By the way, dead link.

 

If that's the sole reason you are hesistant about getting the laptop, don't worry about it. DDR3 has little to no performance benefit over DDR2.

EDIT: Link works for me.

 

i don't know much about laptop hardware, but for desktop hardware, you won't see differences in ddr2 vs ddr3 unless you're a bencher. i'm assuming it's the same way with laptops. if you want real laptop performance, it's in the HD, CPU, and tweaking the OS. the memory does very little to performance.

 

As MidnightSun said. DDR3 provides pretty much no performance difference. The main difference/improvement is a little more battery life.

...Dont worry about it.

 

DDR2 is a little cheaper than 3 right now if you are upgrading, but DDR3 prices are down too. I guess the only problem is DDR2 production will slow down sooner than 3, so if you want to upgrade years from now you would end up paying more than 3 at that point in time. Think trying to upgrade DDR1 memory. It's a trivial consideration though... for all you knwo you may just want a new laptop by then.

 

Yeah, I think the fact that it has 4 GB of RAM will sufficiently outweigh whatever benefit you might have gotten with DDR3. You shouldn't notice any difference in performance, although, like LaptopGun said, DDR2 will become less and less common.

 

That Asus actually has 64 bit Windoes so you could take advantage of all that RAM and be able to upgrade to even more memory. Whether the average user needs that much is a little debatable

 

The power savings is only 0.3V per stick, which is not going to amount to much in that powerful of a laptop. With my Inspiron 1520 with a 15.4" screen, a T-serie processor, and dedicated 8600M GT card (which probably draws less power than your GTX 260 will), 16V is the lowest power draw I can get with the screen on - the power savings if I had DDR3 would be less than 4%. The performance difference is also quite low - less of an impact than either GPU or CPU by a good margin.

 

DDR3 is moot, it wont give you any performance increase that you can even humanly notice, and it wouldnt be more than just a few points in a benchmark score.