MD11 Relief Pilot discovers during preflight that a problem exists the NAV data base installed in their FMC; although the effective date is correct. Enroute it was determined that the NAV data base was three years out of date.

Narrative

Prior to our flight we noticed that some of our waypoints that were on our flight plan were not in our NAV database. We discussed this with our Dispatch Department and a new flight plan was filed. We operated as though our database was out of date. We verified every waypoint and hard tuned navaids and used current enroute charts. We also requested direct routing around built waypoints. Prior to the flight we felt that the program that Dispatch was using was corrupt since our NAV database was only 2 days old. After departure we were given a direct routing to a fix that was not in our database. This made us believe that it was our database that was in error and not dispatches. We called out Flight Operations Department to have them contact the data base manufacturer about our issue. They (Flight Operations) discovered that the load in our FMS was 3 years old. When we arrived at our destination we logged the NAV database discrepancy in our Maintenance Logbook. In the future it would be helpful to get flight ops involved prior to departure. Maybe we can get Dispatch to list the correct FMS NAV load in our flight plans; so we can double check the database number since years are not listed with the day and month in our database.