DDR2 positions could have remained poor but for the announcement of the new Intel 925XE chipset, which was presented by the company last year in November - the first chipset supporting 266MHz FSB (in fact it's just a reworked 925X - there is nothing new in the 925XE, except for the 266MHz bus). It was accompanied by a slightly upgraded version of Pentium 4 Extreme Edition (Gallatin core aka Northwood with L3 cache) at 3.46GHz designed right for the 266MHz FSB. Nevertheless, the first tests of this combo of "two XE" (P4XE + i925XE) were not comforting - memory bandwidth gain turned out far from that considerable. A good thing - the latency dropped due to the memory system operating in synchronous mode with the FSB. This time the culprit was... the processor, its core, to be more exact. That's because FSB frequency alone is not enough to squeeze maximum from the memory system. What's also important is the implementation efficiency of the CPU system, responsible for data exchange with RAM - Bus Interface Unit (BIU), as well as of the hardware/software prefetch algorithms. Which are noticeably worse in Northwood/Gallatin than in Prescott. But the trouble is there are no Pentium 4 processors with this core on the 266MHz bus so far, and none is expected. There is only one solution and we certainly found it - to overclock the existing Prescott with the 200MHz bus. As a result we got sort of a future processor - Pentium 4 3.73GHz. Tests of DDR2-533 memory with this processor at last allowed to reveal its potential completely - first of all the intended memory bandwidth. But: only DDR2-533 (DDR2-667 is out of the question - it will require a 333MHz (!) FSB to reveal its potential) and only with overclocked processor. Thus, top DDR2 models - 667MHz and 800MHz (to be released) models - still have dubious prospects, to be more exact - no prospects at all. Of course, they can also be used in single channel mode, but who will do it when we have DDR-400, which operates perfectly in dual channel mode and has much better characteristics compared to "single-channel" DDR2-667/800?