With DDR4 around the corner, when will it be worth it to upgrade your PC? DDR4 will require new motherboards, should i hold back from building a pc now? or will ddr4 make no difference vs ddr3 motherboards.
DDR4 will not come to consumer motherboards until the end of 2014 at the earliest with Broadwell assuming Broadwell uses DDR4. If Broadwell does not use DDR4 then you'll be waiting until 2015.
Don't hold your breath. We don't know how long it will take, the mobos will be expensive, and it probably won't be worth the upgrade anyway.
You wont need DDR4 for quite some time. There are people with DDR2 that run most applications.
DDR4 is just a more efficient, higher binned version of DDR2 or DDR3.
DDR4 wont have a desktop variant for at least a year, maybe longer. DDR4 will be used in servers, mostly.
kaveri maybe, other than that i don't see any reason to upgrade, i don't really know of many things that benifit much from ram speed
I haven't even seen enterprise grade DDR4 yet and that leads me to believe we wouldn't see consumer level until mid/late 2015. And, as stated, it's not going to give you a huge increase in performance.
I think we will see the advantages of ddr4 starting the in server sector. As like everyone else has said nothing will really use it on the consumer end.
Haswell e will use ddr4 as well. Maybe not technically consumer, but lets be honest a lot of us here arent "consumers" in the traditional sense ether.
I doubt it will become available to all consumers before Q2 2015.
DDR4 advantage is that producers are promising much higher capacities, 32GB models have been demonstrated about a year ago and there is talk of 128GB sticks (probably a long way away, but with something like QUAD CHANNEL support on socket 2011 someone could have 1TB of ram, that is something I find amazing, hopefully amd will pull its head out of its asse and re-enter the dekstop CPU market to force INTEL to add reasonable performance improvements to each generation again...).
Just think of what could be done with 1TB of ram, people with workstations are bassically stuck on 64GB max for now.
Yes, it will be larger memory capacities and greatly reduced per GB power usage(as densities will bassically be double [32vs16GB] and nominal power consumption significantly lower right of the bat). Hopefully microfail will not release another 32Bit Windows OS after DDR4...
Let's iron out some of the main questions first then i'll move on to my opinion:
- Will DDR4 be released on a consumer level anytime soon? No, probably will come out on a consumer level by the end of 2014/ first quarter 2015.
- Is it worth upgrading for? No, assuming DDR4 is progressing like RAM has since the original DDR, Clock speeds & higher capacity's mainly, we wont see any gaming improvement.
- Should you hold off your build? No, maybe wait until Christmas but, not for DDR4; you will be waiting a very long time.
RAM advancements don't really matter to the regular consumer, but they do matter to people who host servers, video editors ETC. Higher capacity's are always nice, just imagine 32GB sicks of RAM! Then we have clock speeds which will increase, stock speeds for consumer Home PC RAM will probably 2133mhz or something. Also the motherboards will also be very expensive when they are released, like the first DDR3 mobos.
I only recently upgraded to DDR3 and a newer system, a Core 2 Quad Q6600 @ 2.4ghz & 4GB DDR2/3. Before i upgraded to my new system i tested some DDR3 RAM in the old mobo, up to 4GB of 1600mhz was supported. I discovered there is maybe a 1FPS increase in games and a 5% maximum increase in video render times.
In conclusion i'd say DDR4 is going to be the same as every RAM advancement: higher capacity's, higher clock speed & better CAS latency's.
They are also supposed to be more power efficient. Which, again, is more important for servers than desktop users.
I have a question, when ddr4 hit the market will the old ddr3 mbo's/rams lower their price? My friend is planing to buy new rig, and we dont care about ddr4 in our system but we were wondering if we should wait for it to hit the market for price reduction on 'older' parts?