- Hey, everyone.
It's me, the Tech Tips Man.
Now that DDR5 has reached insane speeds
of over 10,000 megatransfers per second,
we've gotta know, which sticks should you spend
your hard-earned money on?
A single kit could cost you anymore
from $160 to over $400.
So making the right choice can be the difference
between wallet pain and wallet death.
To help you out, we put the screws to 10 kits
ranging from stock JEDEC speeds,
all the way up to 7,800 megatransfers per second
on both Intel and AMD platforms.
Does it matter a little?
Does it matter a lot?
Has the lab managed to find the DDR5
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- Right now, Intel has the only platform
where we can test both DDR5 and DDR4
on the exact same CPU.
So, that's where we started.
And Intel also had the benefit of being more stable
throughout our testing.
We'll get into that a little bit more later.
For now, all you need to know is that we took
some of the beefiest hardware commercially available,
plugged in some memory kits,
enabled XMP, and went to town.
We're gonna have all the gear that we used linked
down below if you wanna check it out for yourself.
Right outta the gate,
we can clearly see that in most games,
fast DDR4 is still a valid option.
But that price-to-performance advantage
that it enjoyed in the past
seems to have pretty much disappeared.
This is a 3,600 megatransfer per second kit
with pretty tight timings.
And while it beats our DDR5 JEDEC kit
by anywhere from one to 10 fps on average,
it does so at a considerably higher price.
And once we're spending the same amount on our DDR5,
our DDR4 not only loses its advantages
but falls measurably behind,
especially in the all-important 1% lows.
The thing is, average frame rates are interesting,
but the difference between 311 and 315 fps
is basically impossible to discern.
So, this bar usually matters a lot more
because a 10 or even five fps difference
is much more likely to be noticeable.
And it also represents how your system will perform
in the most critical moments,
when the action is most intense.
For gamers, then, DDR5 is looking like an obvious choice,
and more must be better, right?
Not necessarily.
Adding our 7,600 and 7,800 megatransfer per second kits
to the graphs, I mean, yeah, they performed admirably,
but just a few more fps?
And sometimes less for 100-plus dollars more
than our other options?
What's going on here?
I mean, look at these numbers in AIDA64.
The more we spend, the more memory bandwidth we get,
so our performance should go up proportionally, right?
Well, here's the thing.
AIDA64's read, write, and copy benchmarks are super useful
for uncovering system bottlenecks and diagnostic purposes,
but they are purely synthetic.
That is to say that they are not representative
of any real-world workload,
other than copying data directly into or out of memory.
And not every application is actually hungry
for more bandwidth.
For some applications,
latency is actually much more important,
and that's where our DDR4 kit shines,
with only the fastest DDR5 kits closing the gap.
Most of the DDR5 kits that we tested today
hit first word latency figures of 10 nanoseconds or faster,
but our DDR4 kit managed less than eight nanoseconds.
You can roughly calculate these values for your own kit,
by the way.
Just take your module's CAS latency,
or how long it takes to complete a clock cycle,
then multiply it by 2,000 and divide by the transfer speed.
The lower the first word latency,
generally, the snappier your memory will be.
But, as evidenced by the performance improvements we see
with our faster kits,
it is both this latency and transfer speeds
that are crucial when it comes to getting the most
out of your system's memory for applications
and games today.
Look at these two 6,000 megatransfer per second kits.
There's a pretty stark difference in CAS timings here,
resulting in a 3.3 nanosecond difference in latency.
The faster one is a little over $20 more
for about a one-to-five fps improvement.
But, if we bump up the speed to the 6,400 kit
with timings that keep us at 10 nanoseconds,
we get more performance
but start to hit our point of diminishing value returns.
And then anything past this point
sees such a stark drop in performance improvement
that it doesn't really warrant spending tens
or hundreds of extra dollars
to try to make the line go up, at least at current pricing.
But what about AMD?
Well, for Team Red,
our biggest hurdle was just getting kits faster
than 6,400 megatransfers per second to even run.
Long story short, they didn't,
and that's unlikely to change anytime soon.
Our testing started mid last month,
so that's December of 2022.
And we were running on AGESA version 1.0.0.3 Patch D.
Right before we filmed this,
GIGABYTE dropped a new BIOS for our motherboard
that included an update to 1.0.0.4,
supposedly improving memory support.
And it does, but the difference wasn't enough
to boot any of our previously incompatible kits.
I'm certain that professional overclockers will be able
to use this extra headroom to push the platform
to new heights, but our goal was to measure
the out-of-box experience,
so we didn't do any tuning beyond plugging in the CPU,
plugging in the RAM,
and enabling XMP, or EXPO, as it were.
The good news is that even though it's relatively slow,
our 6,400 memory absolutely slayed on AMD.
Going from a basic DDR5 kit to a premium
but still not outlandishly priced kit
saw almost every game gain 10% average fps or more.
This is especially notable because these are similar games
to what we saw on Intel,
but we aren't spending as much on our top-performing memory,
since we topped out at a lower speed.
And it's safe to assume that if future BIOS updates
can get the Jell-O to stop shaking,
AMD's performance should only improve
as we get stable access
to significantly faster memory, right?
Mm, well, not exactly.
We are still hitting the point of diminishing returns here,
especially when you consider the price.
AMD's chips really like tighter timings,
and that seems to be the biggest factor
when it comes to games.
I mean, sure, the JEDEC spec 4,800 CL40 kit is
way slower than our top end.
But look at this 5,600 CL28 result.
It's on par or just behind
its more expensive counterpart.
And for about $20 less.
And the reason lies here.
While the transfer speed might be higher
on that 6,400 kit,
it actually has the same first word latency
as the 5,600 configuration.
I mean, if you were to take that faster kit
and sit around for hours tuning the timings,
chances are that you would end up with a better result.
During our quick sanity check with the latest BIOS,
we found that AGESA 1.0.0.4 does improve stability
at 6,400 with manually tightened timings.
But the reality is that many of you don't even overclock
your CPU these days, let alone your memory.
And realistically, your time is probably better spent
buying our new underwear from lttstore.com.
We've not new colors available.
Check them out today.
At least, that's true for gaming.
For productivity, where we'll have a lot more CPU cores
to feed with delicious data,
it's a whole different beast.
Similar to what we saw with Intel,
faster modules seem to make a huge difference
in some workloads.
And then, basically, none in others.
HandBrake, for example, sees an impressive boost
of 22% over JEDEC, wow.
But then, just about everything else sees
either no improvement, a clearly linear progression
that is so small you might as well save your money,
or what could best be described as run-to-run variance.
One major issue to note
is that we have more productivity results,
but our 6,400 kit didn't manage to finish all of them,
so hence, the did not finish results.
We do expect this to continue to improve over time
as AM5 matures as a platform and new BIOS updates roll out,
but it was a major problem for us at the time of testing,
and the improvements that were available
by the time we're actually filming it
have been pretty marginal.
So, nobody knows exactly what the future will hold.
And it's still not 100% clear where the DDR5 bang
for your buck sweet spot is going to ultimately end up.
I mean, considering that DDR4 launched in 2014
and higher speed kits took years to become the norm,
it's still early days for this new generation.
But what is clear is that you don't want to buy something
with significantly slower first word latency
if you can avoid it.
Particularly on the lower transfer speed modules.
Oh, and also, that there is no point buying faster
than 6,000 or at most 6,400 speed memory for AMD,
at least for this generation.
You know what else is clear?
This piece of glass.
Wait, that's not clear.
It's got a segue to our sponsor.
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- If you enjoyed this video,
we haven't tried it with DDR5 yet,
but you might wanna check out our
just how bad is mixing memory video.
It's not as bad as you might think.
(electronic music continues) Or at least wasn't.